Forums / Maintenance / Suggest Ideas

For the past week, the forum is being flooded by korean ad threads.

This has happened before in the past, but never was it as bad as it is now.
Has anyone an idea to stop this?

What if we used an algorithm that sends an email to the forum mods right after one of the spam contains korean language symbols and the mod judges what decision he/she should make.

Temporarily ban all Koreans from KYM until we can improve our spam filtering capabilities.

Two-step verification and better captcha.

I thought this was a global problem about Asia and poor tasting meat products.

Nuke Korea

You could make it so your account has to be at least a day old and have a new + upvote in the comments section to post on forums. Or you could give reputable users the ability to delete threads because I always see the same profile pics around and there's always someone on. Or create a sub forum for ads so instead of deleting them, the users can just move them to the ad forum and then a mod can go through and delete them in case of misuse.

Giving users the ability to delete/move threads is a terrible idea, and having accounts be unable to post for a day does nothing but delay the spam for 24 hours since the main way spam accounts are identified is by what they post.

Best solution is as Arcanine suggested, just have better account creation security.

You'd have to define "reputable" pretty strictly for that second idea to work right. It's not impossible, but forum posts and threads aren't image metadata. The bar would have to be pretty high.

Then again, if we could get a reasonable system going – e.g. a certain karma level, pundit/orator minimum, AND moderator/admin approval, for instance – it could definitely help.

{ You could make it so your account has to be at least a day old and have a new + upvote in the comments section to post on forums. }

Hasn't this been suggested before? Why not this? It's pretty standard for discussion forums to have a waiting/approval period and I'm pretty sure our problem is exactly why. Deleting them when they pop up a hundred at a time isn't going to make it stop no matter who's doing it.

It would help in the forums but then they'd all just move to entries instead, which would bring this back to the debate over whether BNM should be allowed to make entries. 'Yes' tends to win that particular argument because some of our most popular and high-quality entries were written/started by BNMs.

Windy wrote:

You could make it so your account has to be at least a day old and have a new + upvote in the comments section to post on forums.

I gotta agree with this the most, minus the upvotes. Requiring new users to contribute in some way before they can begin making threads would definitely help.

Particle Mare wrote:

Then they’d all just move to entries instead.

I'd say it's worth a shot, even if it means putting a restriction on BNM entries. Besides, most BNM entries would've eventually been created anyways, and most of the work done on those entries was done by non-BNMs.

Arcanine wrote:

Two-step verification and better captcha.

These are actual people, not robots. Increasing account creation security would do nothing.

Windy wrote:

Or you could give reputable users the ability to delete threads because I always see the same profile pics around and there’s always someone on.

That's what forum mods have already been doing, we're just slower at it because there are less of us. What we should be focusing on is not how to clear spam as fast as possible, but to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

Not 100% on "BNM" but would an initial 24 hour silence period really be that much of a deterrent? Or they could PM a mod a quick "I'm a person!" note to have it lifted early. I think that's less deterring than having your sign up go through an approval process automatically because some people might prefer to just wait a day than contact someone, it's not that long.

That’s what forum mods

Correction, user mods. Since the last update in mod powers deleting spam threads does not requiere you to be a forum mod. Thus, we can finally remove PM's forum powers as she isn't a competent forum mod, at all. Though that's a completely different topic.

Or you could give reputable users the ability to delete threads because I always see the same profile pics around and there’s always someone on.

Mod powers will be given to people that are potential candidates to be a mod. No more, no less. And about giving more powers to mods, I prefer giving them to people that will make use of those powers.

Call me serious when it comes to "mod job" but I honestly prefer people like Tytatrum (or whatever is their name now ) who does his part when it comes to banning bots. The insane amounts of ban in the admin area are proof of that.

I said it on the mod forum, but I'm against giving more powers to people that doesn't deserve them nor they will make use of them.

¿My solution to the problem? We, the mod team, should stop being a bunch of lazy fucks. But the odds are we are reaching that time of the year when everyone is busy and shit so it's understandable. However checking the site from time to time is a good idea.

Do your job people, memes are srs business.

Requiring new users to contribute in some way before they can begin making threads would definitely help.

I support this idea, I wonder how much impact is going to have on the forums but I think it's worth a shot.

Perhaps it could even make the forums more active, taking we promote the forums a bit when a BMN reaches the point in where they can post in the forums. Like showing them that we have a forum and it's an open space for all kinds of talks.

No doubts here, someone is butthurt because they were banned. I wonder who is behind this, we have a huge ass list of people that has a lot of free time in their hands.

Slime cap maybe…?

As much as I know this would never happen, the power to scrap the 3 AM spam threads without having to harass the ever-loving shit out of TwilitLord and Loli would be pretty nice. In all, I'd say a better account verification process is what we could count on. KYM isn't nearly big enough to suffer some huge dip in users from requiring people to, say, comment on an entry before making one themselves. Aside from the massive list of user's we're already losing.

Loli locked the other thread so i'll report it here.

They zerg rushed the video gallery now, multiple accounts (most of them uploaded only 3 videos so it probably was done using a bot) flooded it with more than 80 pages of korean videos, that's over 1600 videos.

As far as i know, when an user gets banned their uploads still remain and manually removing them will be a pain in the ass so… Is there a way to mass remove videos or delete all uploads by an user? If there isn't, it should be a thing.

As far as i know, when an user gets banned their uploads still remain

That's for normal bans. On the ban page there is a button that marks the account as "spam" and removes everything in the process, images/videos, forum posts and comments.

I'm checking the video tab and I'm not seeing those videos. Checked the mod section to see if someone removed them and nothing. I'm guess James deleted all the spam videos in one-go without banning the spam accounts.

This may be controversial but…
James needs to disable video uploads for a short time since the video gallery is currently being flooded by spambots.

Here's a thought and I know this is going to kill the thread's vibe but I feel it should be said:

Why bother making a post about this? If the admins care they'll do something and if they don't they won't. One of the mods needs to contact Don and Don can contact the other admins. That's about all that can be done. They don't exactly seem to read any of what's posted in suggest ideas and if they do they don't indicate so.

Hey Y'all!

We're working on fixing this on our end in ways that hopefully won't impact the ability of real, live, cool new members to post. It's definitely an emergency right now because there's been sooooo much bad spamming.

If anything changes on the user end, we'll let you know, but hopefully Korean spam will leave us alone soon!

Wyn just got

B T F O
T
F
O

It's back, and pretty heavy.

A system that could deny a post by blacklisting certain phrases. I'm sure 4chan has that kind of system.

Heck, maybe just blacklist Korean characters in the title of forum threads until the spambots are somehow blocked once and for all.

I know it's kinda rude, but I can't really think of a better solution.

Roy has a point, as long as it's temporary.
While forum users don't use korean alphabet in titles or messages (usually) it shouldn't be a prolonged action.

will that blacklist only deal with new posts or will it check previous posts as well?

I say, nuke the forums.

^ you monster, were I am going to get my fun time on the Internet without this forum?

Tumblr and 4chan makes about 90% of this site's content.

Actually, it's pretty good idea. I doubt any Korean KYM users would use their language in the forum unless block thread containing common Korean word used in the spam.

It's not really rude given the fact that this is an entirely English forum and site. There are very little Koreans that browse, and if they do, they aren't using Korean in the first place.

Ban key words, I noticed that it is generally the same website so ban anything involving the website, like blacklist it? Or just temp ban all Koreans until this is situated.

Something tell me those korean spambot programmers realized that we're starting to get irritated and they are now just pushing everything they can at us.

You may be on to something.

I think I found the problem.

CAPTCHA seems to be down.

Any mod who isn't Blue, Bob, or myself, confirmed absolutely useless in banning.

Is this a clever reference to banning all Muslims in America until we can improve our screening capabilities?

On a serious note I think so long as there are mods dedicated to their jobs with nothing better to do we have nothing to worry about. Gives them something to feel important about doing and at the end of the day, isn't making the mods feel important what matters most? :^)

but what about muffin

Muffin should've finished the job in '53.

I actually think the "Ban Korean characters" might be a solution, I mean, everyone here is using english, this is an English site, if someone from Korea was to use this site, they must know how to read and type in English in order to post, it's not like we have a large portion of the site making threads in Russian, Japanese and Spanish. It might seem a little racist, but it's about the same as "If you want a job in X-country, you must learn it's language"

It looks like the admins (or whoever can change the site's codes) ran with this idea