Smart spam

[Sol_HSA]

Anyway, it won't completely stop "smart spam", as it's virtually indistinguishable from normal users: written by humans, spread out through time..

It depends... it can be stopped if the post is made on several forums bundled with such an anti-spam. And of course spammers do that!

As do normal people who are not spamming..

[FlashSoul]

Do they really?

Well I can only see one situation where that can legitimately happen : when someone has a very specific problem and wants to maximize his chances of getting an answer (or get some diversity in his answers). This question has to be thematic. A newbie programmer can go ask the same question about programming on several programming forums. An OpenBSD user can go on several BSD forums asking how to build something from source there. An amateur cook can go on a few cooking forums to ask for the favourite crème brûlée recipe of its users.

Do people go on asking the very same thing on a cooking and on a programming forum? I don't think so. That "legitimate spam" problem can be solved by exceptionally allowing it if and only if the problematic post is repeated on forums sharing a common theme. These themes could be specified during the subscription to the anti-spam service or maybe even determined with some form of clustering algorithm. General purpose forums could always opt-out.

Ok, now let's say that spammers understand this concept and respect this new rule, re-using posts only within forums of similar themes. We can add a rule to ensure that users are not allowed to have too many "shared" posts. A real user may post the same thing once on different forums, yes. He may even create two identical threads on each of these forums because he has two different enough questions. But what about replies from other users in his threads? Will they be the same everywhere? No. So his own replies will most likely be different from forums to forums too. Too many shared posts raise suspicion. Too high of a proportion of shared posts raise suspicion. Fix a limit somewhere and you will force the spammers to limit even more re-utilization of posts.

Just some ideas.

[Isaac]

Captchas are pointless; there are some really good ones too, ones that are animated, but with no OCR vulnerable information in any one frame. One I've seen was an HTML5 jigsaw puzzle that you had to solve.

But they are pointless for security; spammers will just make free adult sites that present the captchas from the sites they want to break into, and that gets them 1000+ determined humans to figure them out and provide the answer to any challenge no matter how complex.

[FlashSoul]

But they are pointless for security; spammers will just make free adult sites that present the captchas from the sites they want to break into, and that gets them 1000+ determined humans to figure them out and provide the answer to any challenge no matter how complex.

Then they should be designed to be a turn-off .
captcha : grandma watches

[Darklord]

But they are pointless for security; spammers will just make free adult sites that present the captchas from the sites they want to break into, and that gets them 1000+ determined humans to figure them out and provide the answer to any challenge no matter how complex.

Then they should be designed to be a turn-off .
captcha : grandma watches

Daniel.

[Asteroth]

(spam)
bangbang26 Posts: 1Joined: Mon Feb 04, 2013 10:07 pm


Top

How did this happen? He had a link in his signature. I though that was forbidden to new users.

[antti]

(spam)


Top

How did this happen? He had a link in his signature. I though that was forbidden to new users.

It's possible that he managed to register before the new rule was set: I've noticed that the spammers often take a few days between the registration and posting. But it's also very much possible that the configuration didn't work.

[Asteroth]

And another: This one did wait days after joining:

(spam)
John Adward Posts: 1Joined: Sun Feb 03, 2013 4:51 pm

The work was brilliant. But they really shouldn't have posted on a treasure chest thread when their spam link is to a treasure chest site.

Okay so their spelling and grammar sucks too. But it still had to be a human behind the wheel or they couldn't have put together something vaguely coherent about the animation editor.

[antti]

And another: This one did wait days after joining

He did wait a while but still he managed to register after I set up the new rule, so it seems that I did screw something up... I'll go and check out the configuration again.

edit: alright, I spotted one potential problem in the permissions and fixed it. Let's wait and see if it works!

[mrtnlwrnce]

Taking the help of "Content Moderator" (do Google search) by VKW Inc can be a solution. There are many service providers available in the market who can perform this kind of work in nominal rate...