Can you do something about the spam, please?

You are not alone. Me too. There is a lot of spam really. And, keep visiting, because I learn a lot with your posts.

N/A you're right. On an average day I'm deleting between 10 and 50 spam messages.

A couple of measures have already been taken, like disabling guest posting and banning spammers immediately, but it's still not enough. We're not the only forum though. My-Symbian also has lots of spam posts, but with less forums to maintain, they're easier to clean up there. Even my own small support forum (at opldev.broeze.eu) suffers from at least 5 spam posts per day.

Rafe was talking about a new version of the forums which would be better resistant to spam posts, but I'm not sure about the status of this. Auto-rejection of posts containing certain buzz-words used in lots of spam mail would also help, but brings the risk of rejecting valid posts as well.

Rafe, can you comment on any of the new measures?

BTW I don't agree with your last statement. You would be missed tremendously if you stopped visiting AAS. So please bear with us until we find a way to kill off spam.

Good. Thanks, Arjen. I'd also be more comfortable helping out here, if the seemingly more relaxed warez policy of late would also be tightened up (probably isn't really any policy change, but the warez links seem to stick around instead of being deleted/removed by moderators).

Hi Arjen,

Arjen wrote:My-Symbian also has lots of spam posts

I wouldn't say that My-Symbian has "lots of spam". Where do you see it?

You can ask BentL or s.t.s (our two most active moderators) about how many spam messages they remove. Five a week? Probably less. I remove two a week. Honestly. I don't want to praise my own website but most of our users say that My-Symbian forums are one of the cleanest and the most spam-free discussion forums they know. It's quite surprising for me that you consider My-Symbian forums being filled with spam. I think that N/A (who frequently visits My-Symbian forums) can confirm that they are almost completely spam-free and even if someone posts one or two messages they get removed almost instantly and the spammer gets immediately banned.

Anyway, if I can share my experiences with fellow AAS moderators then my suggestions would be as follows:

1) implement some anti-bot protection that automatically bans all spam bots. I'm not too familiar with vB but in phpBB it's easy to detect a bot registration by checking fields which are not available in the registration form (so normal human visitor can't fill them during registration). If they're filled, like e.g. web site address, it means that the registration comes from a bot and should be automatically banned or cancelled. After I implemented such protection it turned out that almost 100 (yes, a hundred!) registration attempts a day are spam bots! Well, no more reaching my forums!

2) Only allow posting after some time. On my forums it is 24 hours after registration. It not only forces newbies to spend that time on reading existing posts and prevents asking the same old questions all the time but it's also a perfect protection against spammers. If they have to wait 24 hours to post their spam, they prefer finding some other forum and spamming it. And even if some of them come back next day, banning them gives another 24 hours if they re-register. After two such attempts they have enough and go away.

YES, these two protections cause that My-Symbian's members and posts counters increase slower than yours, but they show true members and real posts and the protections keep the forums clean and spam free.

Arjen wrote:but with less forums to maintain, they're easier to clean up there

I concur with Michal; in my experience, my-symbian.com is virtually spam-free.

Michal, apologies. I just thought you had the same spam problems, since I saw the same kind of messages that we're seeing on AAS on My-symbian as well a couple of times. I just figured you were quicker to remove them, since they never last long.

And, thanks for the suggestions. I'll get in contact with Rafe and see if we can implement these here as well. I'm sick and tired of the spammer, since the only thing I'm currently doing in these forums in the spare time that I have to visit here is removing spam.

Hi Michal

Thanks to the information in your post, I also found a nice anti-spam mod that really helps reduce spam by 90% or more. I added this to my own support forums and this effectively stopped the spam until now. I'll be looking into spam protection on these forums now as well. Hopefully we can get rid of (most of) the spammers here too.

Best regards
Arjen

A new mod was installed that doesn't allow any kind of links (url, http, ftp or email links) in new user's first 10 posts. This should start to reduce the amount of spam on AAS.

In the coming weeks Rafe is going to upgrade the forum to the latest version after which we'll be able to add some other spam fighting mods (like SpamBuster) as well.

We're dedicated to eridacting all spam on AAS. If you have any other good suggestions or know of additional measures or mods that will help us to effectively get rid of spam, please don't hesitate to send me a PM.

Any impact the mod has had on spam? It seems there's still quite a lot of SPAM here but without the links (so the mod isn't fully effective as a SPAM blocker).

How about also requiring to get past a "captcha" for the first 10 posts (to make it more difficult for robot posts)?

Hi N/A

Spam has reduced significantly over the last couple of months, but we're still not spam free. This week was a bad week, but I think on average spam has decreased by at least 70% to 80%.

This means that we still have to think of ways to make it even harder for new members. Captcha is an option and I'll look into that (although some robots can read these images as well and the robot-proof captcha's are sometimes very difficult to read for real human beings) and I have the feeling that most of the spam on AAS is non robot originated.

Another option I'm thinking of is to place a user's first post in a moderation queue, inform the moderators of this post by email and, if it's a regular post, approve it as quickly as possible. Until your first post is approved, you won't be able to post new topics. This will reduce spam to almost nothing (and completely stop the robots), but the downside is that the board will be less friendly for new users.

Opinions anyone?

I have a better idea. On first registration you could use the existing rules. So: create a page with one rule and a question which can have three answers which can be selected with a radio button or checkboxes. If the answer is correct then go to the next rule. The registration will be finished only after answering correctly at all questions and in this way the user reads the rules entirely. I must admit that even myself I didn't read the rules entirely at registration, but on some time after.

Yes, the registration will be somehow complicated, but in this way you can test also if the new user really wants to be a member.

For even more security you can put a safety question which should be random, for example: "Answer this: fourty9 - 2 plus seven". I highly doubt that bots will jump over this 😉

I'm still trying to tighten spam problems up. I've implemented some of this at the server level and I know Arjen has done a lot of work in the forums.

One of the problems we're now facing is that having largely eradicated bots (for the most part) we're now faced with human spammers who are, of course, much more difficult to detect.

And just to confirm there absolutely zero tolerance for illgeal software / warez and the like. Its getting harder for me personally to keep up with these as I do not have the time to read every thread. Probably time to consider more mods.

Update:

I've been working on this today. I've added some extra measures. However it is still difficult to look for illegal software automatically so please keep using post reports for this (thanks to those who already do - especially N/A who does more of these than anyone else).

There's now a (hopefully) more secure way to let guests post [only in news forums] and prevent bots registering.

People with less than 7 posts will automatically go through a spam filter aimed at blocking spam. There will be some false positives and some will get missed, but hopefully it should improve things and get the non-link related spams too.

Rafe

Update 2: Tweaked the spam rule set and have just seen the first spam post caught by this.

p.s. I've also try to tweak the forum speed so it is faster. There should be improvements in IE, Firefox was already quite good. For reference I'm now getting sub 1 second loads on most pages.

Is your link blocking for new posters broken, when spammers can (again) post only 1 or 2 times and still get links in their posts?

The link blocker was turned off because it was getting a lot of false positives. I can re-instate it quite easily though (I will keep an eye on it the next few days).

The new system can use keywords to block things and give each thing a score.

A link will, for example, give 5 points (if in the first 10 posts), and mentioning a dollar sign will add a further 5 points, thus blocking the post.

I can therefore train the system, but of course some things still get through.

I've been on the road a fair bit the last 10 days so I'll go through some of the old spam and tweak the filters for these new spams.

The new system does seem to be doing quite well though.

p.s. Just checked the new system and some of the spam should not have got through - not sure how it did.

Just been doing some tests. It appears that it may not be checking new posts correctly. I don't know why but will investigate over the weekend.