What is it with the spam?

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I have noticed for the past year now or so that this place will often get spam. Why is that? Why has it increased and what makes this place so special for spammers?

I think it would be lovely if posts had to be approved first before they appear to filter out the spam and after a certain amount of posts a member makes from mod or admin approval, their posts will automatically appear after submitting it without any mod or admin approval. I don't think a spammer would want to take their time spamming this place if they see their posts need to be approved because they will never be seen by the pubic.

Seconded.

There is clearly a vulnerability in the forums infrastructure.
Up to 5 spammers a day is getting a bit too much.
If that vulnerability can't be directly patched up then the solution is to create stricter criteria on people before they can make threads e.g. they have to be x days old, have made x amount of posts.

Thirded!

It's a policy that certainly seems to work for other sites that I've used and helped moderate in the past. When I was a moderator, I found that approving a few posts each day was much less hard work than dealing with automated spam attacks.

You'd think they would get no one here wants the voodo love specialist, or anything of the sort by now. Anyways yeah perhaps a policy where you have to have to have a profile for a certain length of time and make a certain amount of posts before you can post your own threads would be a good idea.

I notice most the spammers currently made their profile just yesterday or today....it's either that or the moderators/site management are going to have to up their game on banning/deleting profiles of the spammers, but the former is probably easier.

Filtering posts with long digit strings (international phone numbers) in the title would be a big help for the latest stuff. Can't see how that would be a problem for genuine forum members.

Yeah, they definitely need to do something about that spam. Someone should try to contact Alex about it.

It might be because wrong planet is made up of mostly autistics.

This must be a worse day than usual for spam. They always get a page full in the wee hours of the morning (what are the wee hours here in eastern US time zone). Then they all get deleted. But today the spam posts are still here mid day cluttering up at least two subforums.

I doubt that the spammers even care who we are, they'll just take any exploit they can find, and CloudFare is making it far too easy for them. It's about as effective as a "chocolate fire-guard", as my Gran would have said.

Yep. You can blame good ol' DerpFlare for this one.

It's ENTIRE FREAKING FUNCTION is to stop this sort of thing. Instead, what does it do? It constantly tries to stop US, the actual posters. While the BOTS, the hyper-obvious bots that even the dumbest individual could spot for what they are, are allowed to not just post some crap, but are allowed to post PAGES of crap.

YET AGAIN, I ask: what dimwit is PAYING for this service? Because they kinda need to, you know, pay for ABSOLUTELY ANY OTHER DAMN THING. They may as well be throwing money into a blender.

Like I always say, this site is such a mess that I actually consider it a security risk. I dont let my laptop touch it right now since the security stuff on the laptop had it's subscriptions run out, gotta fix that.


I mean, really, when I think of CloudFlare, I think of that "Box Network" scene from Futurama. Because that's probably what happens around there.

It's so droll that us genuine users have had trouble getting past CAPTCHA, while our GAD forum is overrun by these spam bots that somehow manage to get past CAPTCHA.

It's a bit like airport security stopping genuine passengers from boarding the plane, while terrorists somehow manage to get past security and overrun the planes every week.

*sigh*

On one hand, we're a reasonably busy forum; therefore, I'm sure we're attractive to spammers.

On the other hand, disgruntled banned members have, in the past, purposely set-off spam bombs to get "revenge."

Twits.

Someone should make a bot that prank calls the numbers given by the spammers over and over.

I imagine some of the bot problems could be handled with better forum software and hosting