New'ish type of spam I'm seeing

Mendalla said:
But then the spammers would train their AI on how to avoid it and then antispam AI would learn how to catch that so the spammers AI would learn how to avoid that and the AIs would get smarter and smarter until ... BAM... Skynet.🤖
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Whoops! 😁

But without AI, that's been going on since spamming began. When I (unfortunately) used phpBB, I spent dozens upon dozens of unpaid hours patching that trainwreck to keep spammers from registering, but it would only take them a few weeks before they would figure it out and get around the changes.

FTL said:
Preventing post edits for something like the first 50 posts or so would help to discourage this.
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I never thought of that, but I may do that now for new members with minimal posts.

That said, I only have an edit/delete timeout of maybe 15 minutes or so. That is enough time for someone to correct errors in their posts, yet prevents future tampering and especially "rage quitting" where they go in and edit their posts to remove them (when they can't delete posts). And also prevents spammers editing posts after the fact.
 
Wildcat Media said:
Whoops! 😁

But without AI, that's been going on since spamming began. When I (unfortunately) used phpBB, I spent dozens upon dozens of unpaid hours patching that trainwreck to keep spammers from registering, but it would only take them a few weeks before they would figure it out and get around the changes.


I never thought of that, but I may do that now for new members with minimal posts.

That said, I only have an edit/delete timeout of maybe 15 minutes or so. That is enough time for someone to correct errors in their posts, yet prevents future tampering and especially "rage quitting" where they go in and edit their posts to remove them (when they can't delete posts). And also prevents spammers editing posts after the fact.
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Rage quitting. :p I love that term.
 
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Wildcat Media said:
The last time that happened to me was probably more than 15 years ago! Someone got upset, didn't want to be on the forum anymore, and went through and deleted all of their posts by changing all of the text to "." and we never heard from him again. We never knew why, either.
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Yeah, I had the same. Once. Probably about 15 years ago for me as well. They changed all their text to :)

That was a very inexpensive - and excellent - lesson... And they've never told me why either. Life goes on...
 
Xon said:
I run url detection code for the first dozen or so posts, with an allow/moderator/deny list of domains. It catches a lot of this stuff
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Yes, this works great and I do it with most of my forums. I didn't realize I had one where I hadn't configured this...
 
I look for the person's ip address. If it's the same one i block it before it happens.
Was thinking of getting @Xon's addon though it might stop the stuff from the start.
 
Xon said:
I run url detection code for the first dozen or so posts, with an allow/moderator/deny list of domains. It catches a lot of this stuff
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Sounds handy. Is this by using an add-on that you've written?
 
Sal Collaziano said:
Rage quitting. :p I love that term.
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I got a great story of just such a ragequit.

Many many moons ago, our computer club had a LAN party playing Unreal Tournament 2004, which I'm rather good at and had four of us in it.

One of our members had a bit of a temper and wasn't all that good at the game. Unfortunately for him, I kept finding and killing him pretty quickly and often, and, after a while, I started to hunt him down rather than kill other players so much as it was just so satisfying and profitable. I ended up at #1 most rounds mostly by taking him out.

Sometimes, he had the misfortune of materialising right in front of me too, so of course I shot him the instant the materialisation was complete, hence he had no time to do anything before he notched up another kill point for me. :)

After about 30 minutes of being my cannon fodder, he just snapped and smashed his mouse down on the table really hard, where it smashed into lots of little pieces flying everywhere! :ROFLMAO: We all laughed as it was so hilarious, except him for some reason. I then made a somewhat insincere apology and offered him a replacement mouse from the club's stock of mice. However, he was reluctant to continue playing, can't think why...

And my weapon of choice? The flak cannon of course. So deadly!
 
It reminds me of a bloke that just signed up to whinge all the time.
I changed his username to karen to try and make him stop but now he's just whinging about everything.
Funny thing is when he's not posting on my forum it runs better without him. So i might just turn to banning him but i might get @Xon's addon first.
 
FTL said:
Sounds handy. Is this by using an add-on that you've written?
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It is part of my signup abuse detection and blocking add-on.
Signup abuse detection and blocking X

Signup abuse detection and blocking

Provides a toolkit to reduce signup spam

You would need to adjust the options "Link Spam checker: Registration default action" and "Link Spam checker: Default action" from "allow" to "moderate". You can add domains to the lists "Link Spam checker: Accept"/"Link Spam checker: Moderate"/"Link Spam checker: Reject" as required.

I've been considering adjusting the defaults for these options but they can cause a lot of false positives if you aren't aware and adding to the auto-accept list isn't immediately obvious when content gets added to the approval queue.

Part of the add-on is it will extract any custom fields the user fills in at registration, and run XF's content checking against it. Which allows it to catch URLs entered at signup time.
 
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