Forum Spam

[peterpoose]

Originally Posted by sora777

Appreciate the measured response, I make no claims to knowing the inner workings of this forum nor its owners financial gains from this site. But my whole point is there are options out there. If people are so annoyed they can take their internet traffic elsewhere, to a forum that they like better.

Very true but this seems to be the best of a pile of shit forums out there. I like this forum.

Last Sparrow is great also but more traditional orientated.

The 2 other ones I use are nice as well but just too quiet.

[steve.r]

You know being a mod is not so much work or so difficult. On the forum where I am a mod, we get notifications from members reporting posts in email. I mean, everyone has a phone these days and can pick up email anytime of day or night, so I really don't understand the lack of response here.
Like Peter says, this is a good forum, but just not a priority for the owners or the mods, so it seems

[davidarthur]

All gone, please hit report post on a couple of them so at least we get notified about it.

I've added an extra spam question in there to hopefully stop some of the scripts... they'll no doubt get around that in 5 minutes.
Constant cat and mouse game... its not as simple as some may make out. The registration system is linked with another system, it's not a stock vbulletin install and they're writing scripts to get around the registration or manually registering fake accounts and then bulk posting to them.
The core forum software is about 10 years old and doesn't have much in the way of protection, I have spent a fair bit of my spare time looking at migrating to something a bit more modern but for now please report spam.
If anyone can help with moderating when we get a new system up and running please drop me PM me. It'd be much appreciated.

[dougal]

Magic ta da

[Zenpower]

Now where do I go for a new passport?

[PulpB]

Originally Posted by Zenpower

Now where do I go for a new passport?

[ThrobbingSausage]

Aaaaaaand the pieces of shits are back

[Chris_]

Originally Posted by davidarthur

All gone, please hit report post on a couple of them so at least we get notified about it.

I've added an extra spam question in there to hopefully stop some of the scripts... they'll no doubt get around that in 5 minutes.
Constant cat and mouse game... its not as simple as some may make out. The registration system is linked with another system, it's not a stock vbulletin install and they're writing scripts to get around the registration or manually registering fake accounts and then bulk posting to them.
The core forum software is about 10 years old and doesn't have much in the way of protection, I have spent a fair bit of my spare time looking at migrating to something a bit more modern but for now please report spam.
If anyone can help with moderating when we get a new system up and running please drop me PM me. It'd be much appreciated.

Thanks for your work! Email verification doesn't work either? Recaptcha also doesn't work? Or do the accounts really look valid and only when they start posting it gets bad? In that case is there a possibility to rate-limit at least the creation of threads so the moderation work gets reduced?

Migrating probably would probably be a big pain and not necessarily solve the problem. :/

[garethw]

We appreciate that the spam issue is causing a lot of frustration with you guys and as Darthur says: it's not quite as simple as we'd like to sort out, but we are working on it.

Please, if you see anything spammy, report it and we'll deal with it as fast as we can.

It's also worth pointing out that while we understand your frustration, we won't be tolerating insults or homophobic stuff aimed at us (or any other users for that matter). I hope this is the end of such shenanigans.

[davidarthur]

The moderation is pretty painless in deleting tons of posts, its more of a nuisance for you guys until we can login and do it.
The rate limiting is an avenue I went down but the mods for that (and most other stuff) is so outdated, incompatible with other stuff so could potentially do more harm than good.
This forum in comparison to the alternatives out there is very dated which is why I'm looking at replacing it instead of putting sticky plasters on it. It'd be nice to make it work better on mobile devices at the same time.
I managed do a full migration to invision board a few weeks ago, it took almost a full weekend to run but seemed to work afterwards. I just need to make all the existing links work and redirect correctly and set some time aside, there'll be some downtime while I migrate. They have much better methods of spammer detection and far better moderation tools built in.