I never see anything like this on any other forum
We're being targeted because of our swegness
We're being targeted because of our swegness
Whyyyyy
- Thread starter Nuclear_Creeper0
- Start date
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D
Daihok
Guest
Yeah that was a bad night. Let me know if there’s any I missed.
What really sucks? The sheer quantity of spam ruined the "New posts" section. Argh. I must click that link a hundred times a day and now its empty.
I believe it has to do with seeding search engines. Any time a pageA (FTB) links to pageB (MyShittyProducts.Com), pageB gains importance/priority on google.
They don't care if anyone clicks the links, they just want those links to be scraped by google.
Would be great if google could be informed so they could be punished in some way (without it being a ton more work either).
For how long?
There's a lot of conversations on how to mitigate this spam. One thing we're constantly mindful of is being as accessible as possible to people who have genuine tech support inquiries. That means keeping the hoops to a minimum.
I'm not even 100% sure google is involved here. I've been doing some research, and it seems 4 years ago they started aggressively punishing page ranks that were generated by certain skeezy methods (such as forum spamming).
One of the other forums I hang out in has a minimum number of moderated posts on new accounts... Each post viewed by a real person who approves it for the live forum, then when a minimum number of posts is reached the account becomes unmoderated. They're bot free, but at the time it was implemented it was to quash the plat farmers (real cash for in-game loot/currency).
Of course, being for profit they have paid employees for that, and this is a much busier forum
Of course, being for profit they have paid employees for that, and this is a much busier forum
For how long?
I'd say set it so they need 10 posts before not requiring a captcha on starting a new thread. If it's only on new threads, and it's just a captcha and not actually disabling anything, I'd think it would do the trick with minimal downside. Anyone replying to a thread wouldn't even know something was in place.
We have very aggressively set anti bot protection already in use on the forum. CAPTCHAs will only stop the most basic of bots these days so is not a valid solution, we already use captcha in any case. What becomes very difficult to stop is when you have actual people actively trying to bypass forum protections to spam a board, as is what has happened here. Forums are gradually losing their validity as a community communications platform so the only real solution to this may be to ditch the forums completely. For the record though, this spam is not new, we've been dealing with posts identical to this for several years, not much you can do when they take advantage of a holiday period to try and make their mark on a forum. I also admin another Minecraft community forum and we also get these kind of posts, it's just a part of running an online forum these days. If you spot something quite as severe as this in future though be sure to ping me on twitter and I can deal with it more promptly.
Edit: In fact, after reviewing the posts that had been cleaned it is very apparent that the spammers this time were deliberately making several 'clean' posts before spamming their advertising in order for them to bypass the limits we already have set.
Edit: In fact, after reviewing the posts that had been cleaned it is very apparent that the spammers this time were deliberately making several 'clean' posts before spamming their advertising in order for them to bypass the limits we already have set.
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You mean I didn't magically solve your problem you've been dealing with for years and on a regular basis with my 15 seconds of thought and one-liner posts? What has the internet come to??
Just sniped another spammer. They usually follow a pattern: first there's a less-obvious-spam post where they're teaching the bot which buttons/links/etc to use, and then they activate the bot and you get a bunch of junk.
A few suggestions, based on my experience on the Hypixel forum. Spam is impossible on that forum because of a few things:
A. So many people on at once, Spam threads immediately get reported by a community member and within minutes they are deleted.
B. Tons of Moderators, as reports come in, they quickly lock or delete threads.
C. As @Hambeau said, the first posts until you reach Member get checked by mods before they go public.
Since its impossible to just get more people on the forum, the first option isn't viable.
The second ones are completely possible and would directly prevent spam by not letting it occur in the first place.
As for the 'clean' post bypass, the mods would check those posts to look for the language in the post, for example. Your first post is usually asking for help or where to look for answers, etc.. If its not then they keep a closer eye on the person.
These are things that do not/cannot apply to this forum. This is a much smaller forum. This is how smaller forums have to work. There aren't an army of volunteers to moderate every forum 24/7
As for C, that's far too oppressive.
This is not hypxel.