Problems with Spam Cleaner?

[RickM]

Hi all,

We've had a number of problems on our forum with the Spam Cleaner. We've got several moderators on our forum. All of which are global mods. However for some reason the spam cleaner doesnt show/work for all members, providing no reason or explination as to why its effectively disabled for them.

I've been through the permissions about 10 times trying ti figure out whats wrong but it just feels so...messy. Maybe its because we have a high number of forums, but I just cant fathom out what the hecks going on.

On top of this, its impossible for a moderator to see if a member has been banned...I completely understand that the idea is to not show members as banned as it makes the place look bad, however surely moderators/admins NEED to see if a member is banned (remember, moderators cant login to the admin area so have no way of looking it up).

Is the spam cleaner finished? If so, any reason why it doesnt work half the time? Really stuck with this one and would appreciate any input that may help us get somewhere!

Cheers,

Rick

 

[Mike]

A lot of this is detailed here: http://xenforo.com/help/spam/

There are options that control the conditions in which the spam cleaner can be used (number of posts, length of registration, etc). Those must be passed.

There is also a moderator permission for using the spam cleaner. If your mods don't have that, they won't be able to use it regardless. (It's not a per forum permission; look at the moderators section, or user permissions.)

 

[RickM]

All moderators, supermoderators and admins had specific 'allow' permissions set on the Spam Cleaner. It just seems to be dodgy sometimes :/

Another issue we've noticed is the banned members. A moderator has no way of telling if a member is banned. I brought this up once before and was told it was as designed. I understand and agree that members dont need to see a 'member banned' notice, but moderators must always be able to see this. Bit disappointed that we had to manually add this.

 

[Mike]

If you find a user that you can't use the spam cleaner against that you think you should be able to use, go to:

http://<url>/spam-cleaner/<user id>/ (eg, http://example.com/spam-cleaner/3/)

It should give you a fairly specific error as to why you can't use the cleaner against that person. What sort of error do you get?

 

[RickM]

Hi Mike,

Did as you said by going to the URL. "You may not use the spam cleaner against users who have been registered for longer than 14 days."

Disabled all the criteria as we have a number of spammers per day, being bots a lot of them register and then wait a month or so before doing anything. IMO this setting needs reviewing as it wont take spammers long to cotton on to the fact that on most XenForo forums they can just wait 14 days and get away with it.

Thanks for your assistance though - much appreciated

 

[Paul B]

You can change the criteria at any time yourself.

See here for some further information: http://xenforo.com/help/spam/

 

[RickM]

Yeah, I ended up changing it. But surely having it set to such low numbers by default is going to be an issue for 99% of users.

Whats to stop a spammer working out that most XenForo forums have a 14 day limit for moderators to ban spam links, and after that it has to go through someone with ACP access. I just think it causes more trouble than its worth having it set to 14 days.

What harm is having it set to 30 or even 60 days? If you've got decent moderators they are hardly going to go around banning people for the sake of it...

Its effectively saying that once a member has been there for 14 days they are trusted!

 

[Paul B]

Well the same argument could be made for any of the options in the ACP really.

It's up to each site administrator to go through them all and ensure the site is configured to exactly how they want.

 

[masterchief]

Killed my first spammer... from China.
218.66.250.178

user was going straight to [LN]Blog section everytime, writing out seven or so pages of drivel impregnated with advertising.

my spam protection was set tracking for seven days, boosted that number up to 30 days and had three logins from same IP. its all about settings.