Forums / Maintenance / Report Problems

I've been noticing recently (and I'm sure the mods have been as well) that bot accounts are now able to make forum posts. What is up with that and is there a way we can stop the bots. It's causing a lot of problems on the general thread at the moment instead of actual threads. No one wants to buy their "products" that are likely malware. Is there anyway we can control the bots? Like one of the bots made an entry before it got deleted and I think now is the time to sort these out instead of just getting malware ads everywhere that people could click on.

This has been going on since the start of the site. Our current system is mods spam banning them, which deletes all their site contributions.

We could potentially set up a filter, but unlike Korean spammers, there is not any specific words that are used. Maybe ".com"

No English filter would work since someone on the forums is bound to use that word at some point. There's nothing that can be done except banning them on site, or setting up a sign up test that filters bots.

Our Korean filter is set to only activate in the first 15 minutes (I think, could be longer) after someone activates their account, auto-banning them if they create a thread with Korean characters in the title,

This could be expanded to "http://", basically a full URL, which is 75% of the spam we ban nowadays and not something a new user will use.

That'll help, but it won't completely solve the problem. A spam thread just popped up whose title is not a link.

Something I've noticed is that most bots don't seem to understand textile. Where most humans would post a link, spambots will just put https://knowyourmeme.com/.

Maybe we could set up a system where, if a thread contains a link that isn't in textile, it gets temporarily hidden until a mod can look at it. Then they can delete it or, on the off chance that it's legit, approve and unhide it.

Idea: add certain keywords and phrases to the blacklist.

For example, if someone makes a thread with "skin care" in the title, they would be banned.

That won't work.
What if I actually want to discuss skin care?

This is a meme site, nobody here takes care of their fucking skin.

Honestly though, there will always be a way to get around spam filters.

And ignoring RandomMan's joke, I do actually think something like "skin care" shouldn't be filtered out.

There's always a way to get around something. The question is, how easy do we want to make it? I'm pretty confident they won't just "learn" and we'll have the same amount of spam no matter what we do. More stringent measures would result in less spam. (or more user mods who can ban spambots quickly, but that's another issue.)

I don't know how easy it'd be for James to implement different measures, but he was able to filter by Korean characters, we know. (RIP Arcanine.) It's highly likely he could filter by certain key phrases, words, and partial words.

Spambots follow a pattern. Some words are used consistently. Apparently some sites think advertising on KYM is a good idea. A similar idea like the Korean filter (if done within a certain timeframe after making an account) could probably net a ton of the spambots automatically, if provided a list of words that spambots love to use.

The current filter is set to only activate if someone makes a thread with the specific triggers in their title within a certain period after activating their account (I believe it was 15 minutes).

So things like skin care still can be filtered out, as it's save for us to make threads about it. Only those with insanely fresh accounts need to watch out, but the odds of them legit wanting to talk about skin care is next to zero.

Like Rivers said, adding specifics to the filter based on popular spam combinations can save us a lot of trouble. Like recently I've been dealing with a lot of full URLs in the title, meaning http:// is already something to autoban.

This may sound a little weird, but I actually ENJOY reporting spam accounts. Does anyone know if there's a way for me to see or get a daily list of new accounts? If we don't get too many at once, I'd wouldn't mind looking at postings from new users every day or two and ratting them out.

This is daily business in the General forum, every day again. This is also during a dead timezone, when few or no mods see them. Even when I see them I don't always delete them, because my breaks are limited and frankly I'm not gonna waste them on spam.

This is why I'm requesting to update the korean filter with URLs.