Bye Bye . . . SPAM wins

[bwilson4web]

Sorry, I don't have time to fiddle with this nonsense.

Bob Wilson

 

[Exi3]

That's unfortunate

 

[vreihen]

Does the forum software have an option where new user posts are moderated until it appears to be coming from a real person and not an SEO spambot? Maybe an option to not allow new users to post links until they make X many posts? That certainly discourages SEO spambots, since they can't put up the links they need to tilt web search engines.

Captcha is useless these days. You don't even need AI to work around it, with the labor rate in some parts of the world being cheap enough to employ humans to do nothing but solve captcha questions for the spambots.....

 

[i3Houston]

Just ignore it! Hopefully admin will have sometime one of these days to get rid of them.

 

[alohart]

Just ignore it! Hopefully admin will have sometime one of these days to get rid of them.

It can be difficult to find valid threads among hundreds of new spam threads. Today I noticed for the first time spam replies to existing threads which can't be detected until each thread is opened.

The administrator either is unable to block the spam or doesn't care enough to block it. His response to spam reporting can be very slow (hours or even days).

I'm about to give up like Bob did. I already spend too much time reading about the i3 on various sites. Wading through all the spam adds to this time which I don't need.

 

[Exi3]

Full post here: https://www.mybmwi3.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6339&start=20#p58685

This is what we're doing:

We have updated the forum software, including the anti-spam plugin that connects to stopforumspam.com database.

We have also added recaptcha to the registration system, so in order for a spammer to get through, they have to be coming from a 'new' IP address that has never been reported for spam before, and they need to be a human clicking on the recaptcha and also confirming their account with a valid email address.

We could make all new users go through a manual moderation process before they can post, but that's a lot of work. It's a different type of work I guess - one is deleting spam junk, the other is approving valid junk
Might be the way to go...

 

[CharonPDX]

Remember, this is not admin's full time job. This is a small "hobby forum" with (presumably) no paid employees. Yes, it takes time to deal with the spam, as admin almost certainly has a day job and needs to actually pay attention to that.

I just ignore the forum and come back a day later when I see it has been overrun with spam.

 

[i3Houston]

We could make all new users go through a manual moderation process before they can post, but that's a lot of work. It's a different type of work I guess - one is deleting spam junk, the other is approving valid junk
Might be the way to go...

Is it possible to add Super Users who can assist with moderation process.