Spambots?

[Bry89]

Is it just me or am I seeing an influx in spambots recently? Just now there was one person who had to cheek to post not one but three threads about cakes and days ago, there was another to do with football teams and Twitter in the business world (where I felt tempted to leave a snarky response to it). Not long after I joined, I got a PM from one asking me something to do with an investment and I just told it to piss off.

Something should really be done about this, because we can't have these morons clogging up this forum, even though it's not as bad like how it is in other forums out there, but still.

[grant hayes]

It's not new here, Bry89. There have been even worse spates of it in the past.

[Bry89]

I can imagine that... must give the staff a really hard time back then.

[Electron.John]

I delete all spam posts and ban those spambots when I see them but I am not on all that much these days. The moderators do the same. You can help by flagging any spam you see. I get a flag report and then can go through and handle them on a case by case basic. Spambots are a problem but as Grant noted, not as big a problem as they have been in the past.

[Bry89]

Well, that's good to know then but it would still irk some people, but no forum will ever be free from them, no matter how tight the security measures are. On the subject of staff though, who are the rest of the team besides you? Can't seem to find that out under the Member List. Just that I know who can be out to purge the mess they leave behind again.

[Electron.John]

There are four moderators: Catz, Emmy, RhymeLovingWriter and Joe Bobbo

[RhymeLovingWriter]

I see that I'm listed as a moderator. I just thought that had something to do with the number of posts I had. I have no objection to helping to combat this annoyance (spambots), but what exactly do I do? Could you PM me with instructions/follow-up? I'd love to help out in the zone.

[Bry89]

Upon seeing not one but four spammy threads from Zachparise, something really needs to be done even though it doesn't happen as much as some say. Maybe have stronger security because, I don't think just email confirmation and image verification is enough. Nowadays, spambots can bypass these. One other forum I'm on uses "sortable CAPTCHAs" which dealt with the problem very effectively and I wonder if something like that implemented here. I mean, people want to see other's poetry, not anything to do with American football, social media nonsense - or cakes.

I would also advise all staff to use StopForumSpam to see if their names or IP address match those found in its database. For that person I mentioned, he didn't appear in it so... maybe he's human after all? I don't know.

[RhymeLovingWriter]

What is StopForumSpam?

[Bry89]

It's a site where it holds a constantly-growing database of usernames and IP addresses known to be spambots, and showing evidence of what they've done. Look it up and see for yourself. I highly recommend it to any forum staff, even those of smaller communities. One forum I was on even had a plugin of it at one time and it really worked.