About the spam trols

Mr. Jingles · Jan 22, 2015, 4:06 AM

<snipped spam="">1.Post limit for new members?
2. Restricted board for new members?</snipped>

Supermule · Jan 3, 2015, 12:23 PM

What about another forum thats more secure??

stephenw10 · Jan 3, 2015, 3:09 PM

What do you mean? Something other than SMF?

Supermule · Jan 3, 2015, 3:54 PM

Yes

Mr. Jingles · Jan 3, 2015, 5:19 PM

To be honest, I kind of like the forum software that FreeNAS uses.

Supermule · Jan 3, 2015, 5:27 PM

Either FusionBB or IP Board come highly recommended.

Web Wiz forums is the one used here : http://www.spindekrogen.dk

Thats my personal favorite.

Mr. Jingles · Jan 3, 2015, 6:07 PM

@Supermule:

Either FusionBB or IP Board come highly recommended.

Web Wiz forums is the one used here : http://www.spindekrogen.dk

Thats my personal favorite.

I am going to dig up my Netscape Navigator 0.4-B2, I gotta have it somewhere on one of my floppies ;D

cmb · Jan 21, 2015, 10:46 PM

@Supermule:

What about another forum thats more secure??

It's not that anything with SMF is insecure, in fact it has the best security track record of any forum software I've seen. Spam on popular forums is a universal problem, switching forum software won't change that at all. If you have a highly-trafficked forum, it's going to get hit a ton by spam bots (the vast, vast majority of which here are blocked in some fashion before they can do anything).

It happens in waves if you notice, we add something to improve anti-spam in general, things are great for a short period, then that countermeasure is broken by a tiny fraction of the spammers. Others eventually start to catch up. Rinse and repeat.

Recaptcha was the last thing we added/changed, which was highly effective for a while, but has apparently since been broken or else there are humans out there doing the spam registrations for a small percentage.

kejianshi · Jan 21, 2015, 10:51 PM

unemployed humans doing it I'm sure… Or maybe employed as spammer humans....

jahonix · Jan 22, 2015, 4:01 AM

…and I always thought that quoting a spam message in total is worse than the (already deleted) spam itself.

It seems to be arabic or so which I can neither read nor understand. Probably it's not just advertising Viagra.
IF it is any kind of a radical statement I wouldn't want this to still be readable, would I? Anyone knows what it's about (google translator doesn't).

cmb · Jan 22, 2015, 4:07 AM

@jahonix:

…and I always thought that quoting a spam message in total is worse than the (already deleted) spam itself.

Just as bad I guess, I snipped out the spam text.

Mr. Jingles · Jan 23, 2015, 4:33 PM

@Mr.:

<snipped spam="">1.Post limit for new members?
2. Restricted board for new members?</snipped>

I don't know if this forum software allows for it, but I once was a mod at a economics forum, and we used IPB. In there, the above two suggestions were standard functionality we used. Can SMF do this too, perhaps, especially the second one?

cmb · Jan 23, 2015, 9:02 PM

Anyone else noticed most all the spam in recent months happens at about the time India and similar parts of the world are starting work for the day? Makes me wonder how much of it now is people behind a keyboard rather than bots that are hitting us here at least.

@Mr.:

@Mr.:

<snipped spam="">1.Post limit for new members?
2. Restricted board for new members?</snipped>

I don't know if this forum software allows for it, but I once was a mod at a economics forum, and we used IPB. In there, the above two suggestions were standard functionality we used. Can SMF do this too, perhaps, especially the second one?

Yes, though that'd be an inconvenience as much as it'd help anything. Quite often new users register to contribute to an existing thread, and that'd make it painful for them to do so. Some of those include some very smart people who contribute significantly in a small number of posts. John Brzozowski, Chief Architect of IPv6 at Comcast is one that comes to mind, though there are several others.

stephenw10 · Jan 23, 2015, 10:21 PM

Is it possible to stop new users posting URLs or at least make them non-clickable?

Steve

jdillard · Feb 27, 2015, 8:54 PM

I've slowly been exploring Discourse as an option to migrate to: http://www.discourse.org/

Twitter, among others, uses it for their developer community: https://twittercommunity.com/

Someone has written a migration tool for SMF 2 (that still needs to be looked at and tested): https://meta.discourse.org/t/importer-for-simple-machines-2-forums/17656

Sam and Jeff come from StackExchange where they had a lot of experience with dealing with spam and have some interesting solutions: https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-about-the-spam-problem/2724/6

Also, it isn't PHP, is mobile friendly, etc.

There is no time frame on the potential migration, but Discourse has a pretty hefty lead at this point.

chpalmer · Feb 28, 2015, 7:58 AM

My vote is stay SMF. (that is if I have one… ;D )

Ive been on many different forums and seems to me the spammers have ways into any of them. They seem to propagate to the forums with the most traffic and hover there.

Staying vigilant about deleting their posts and accounts quickly seems paramount to making them feel unwelcome.

Seems like those most successful at halting them at the gate have an approval process that takes lots of time.

cmb · Feb 28, 2015, 8:57 AM

@chpalmer:

My vote is stay SMF. (that is if I have one… ;D )

Everyone's opinion is welcome. Whether or not they hold any weight is at our discretion. ;D We definitely put heavy weight towards the majority opinions of community members in manners such as these.

My vote, at this instant at least, is to stay with SMF as well. Maybe there's a compelling reason to move to a new platform at some point, but I don't see one right now. I'm not opposed to change if there is a better option at some point.

kejianshi · Feb 28, 2015, 10:14 AM

Good luck killing all the spam.

heper · Feb 28, 2015, 11:01 AM

if it's too much work to deal with spam, then esf should ask for / appoint some more mods , to help deal with the spamming.

jdillard · Feb 28, 2015, 7:55 PM

Just to be clear, this is something I have mostly been doing on my free time out of personal interest in methods of community organizing. I only replied because the subject came up in this thread. SMF has and continues to do a great job for us and looks healthy: https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF2.1/graphs/contributors

To me forum software has basically been different flavors of the same lollipop until more recently where some interesting solutions to organizing online communities and their generated discussions have been tried and tested.

In terms of spam, I view putting creative locks on the front door and assigning certain people the privilege of hitting anything with a bat that looks like spam that comes though as a little old school (but still necessary mind you). When possible I prefer to arm everyone (well this analogy escalated quickly) and leave bouncers as a last resort.

Spam also wasn't the only "problem" I was trying to see has been solved more elegantly elsewhere. Other features of note:

just-in-time loading so you don't have to slog through pages if you forget what page a post was on
one level threaded comments (on the fence, but seems to prove useful in a Q&A support scenario): http://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/
live preview of reply text, with out having to leave the context of the thread.
comprehensive API
community moderation (i.e. arming everyone)
so much more: http://www.discourse.org/about/

If this ever gets to a point where I have tested it and feel comfortable with a migration, there would be plenty of community input pre and post migration as before: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,65565.0.html, but for now it is merely one idea of many.