Recent spam posts

Feedback
1

I’m hoping something is done about this quickly. It’s quite annoying seeing all kinds of annoying spam posts.

3 Likes
2

I am working on it. Seems to be a large-scale attack with more than a hundred bot accounts created in a few hours.

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3

All spam posts have been removed and extra checks have been put in place to combat future spam attacks.

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4

The cost in time and effort to not only create but then to remove, what a waste for all

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5

Thanks for your work!

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6

Thank you @abhishek ,
I am with @callpaul.eu here, really stupid activity wasting your time and annoying everyone.

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7

It did take a lot of time in clean up actually.

Now, any post from new accounts will have to be manually approved by a moderator.

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8

Will that slow down the questions appearing ?
Perhaps putting new users off

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9

It shouldn’t be an issue, I am usually checking the forum. If you find that new posts aren’t approved, then you can drop me a DM. :grin:

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10

Maybe it would be sufficient to inhibit adding links and uploads/pics to new users, for a while after registration. I think some other forums do this as well.

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11

I think @abhishek means new topics. Replies should be unaffected?
I think it is a small price to pay for being free of that rubbish.

I think that is already in place… or at least it used to be before the last discourse upgrade.

It is interesting that technology has failed in this case , and we had to resort to human intervention.

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12

This may be obvious but how do we know if there are questions waiting approval

13

Why do we need to know?

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14

So we can answer or not or advise if there are questions waiting approval

15

I am happy to only answer approved questions from new users.

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16

If technology is going to filter input to our forum, it needs to work something like the ‘three gates of speech’

The three gates of speech: Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates.

    At the first gate, ask yourself, is it true.
    At the second gate ask, is it necessary.
    At the third gate ask, is it kind.

Our recent spate of intolerable posts would have failed on all three.

Now, why cant we setup a filter using AI to apply the above sort of tests to all posts from new users?
The one part of AI that seems to work is the language model and that is the part we need for such a filter.

2 Likes
17

You cannot answer if you don’t know the question. :grin:

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18

I know lots of people who do that all the time, experts in everything.

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19

That is already in place. These spam accounts are smarter. They randomly visit various forum topics, like existing post to gain the trust level 1 and then post the links etc.

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20

You won’t know. Only moderators can see.

Now, anyone wants to volunteer for moderation to help the forum stay active but in good health? Just for approving the genuine posts and weeding out the spam.

When you are logged in as moderator, you can see an ‘in review’ section.

3 Likes