# Why isn't spam being removed?



## electriceye

A single account is slamming all the threads with spam. While the acount has been reported, all the posts are still up. Is anyone even monitoring this?


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## Konfyouzd

Some things take time I imagine. Pro tip: PM this to a mod rather than cluttering the forum w a thread like this. Isn't clutter what you're complaining about?


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## bostjan

http://www.sevenstring.org/threads/lots-of-spam-posts-lately.324948/#post-4785708


Konfyouzd said:


> Some things take time I imagine. Pro tip: PM this to a mod rather than cluttering the forum w a thread like this. Isn't clutter what you're complaining about?


+1

Is clutter an issue for you? If so, try new Klutter Kutter™. Send a check or money order to me now, and I'll send you not one, not two, but THREE packs of Klutter Kutter™. But wait! That's not all...act now, and receive a FREE GIFT for only $19.99! Wow!

Seriously, though, these sorts of posts are annoying, but they are less so if you ignore them. I mean, ...literally click "ignore."


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## Xaios

So, did anyone actually PM a mod? Because those posts and the offending user are still there.


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## MFB

Xaios said:


> So, did anyone actually PM a mod? Because those posts and the offending user are still there.



Techno made a post yesterday, that may be gone now since I can't find it, but the jist of it was that in order to remove those posts, they'll have to go one by one and individually remove them as the forum upgrade removed their ability to wipe all posts from one user


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## Xaios

MFB said:


> Techno made a post yesterday, that may be gone now since I can't find it, but the jist of it was that in order to remove those posts, they'll have to go one by one and individually remove them as the forum upgrade removed their ability to wipe all posts from one user


Yeah, I noticed that the posts disappeared about 20 minutes after I made that post. Bummer about the restrictions imposed by the new software, that's gotta make the job a lot harder.


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## schwiz

Looks like the spammer is at it again.


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## technomancer

It depends. If the software flags posts as spam it is easy for the mods to clean up... if like the bot with 90+ posts where it doesn't get flagged by the system then we have to wait for Alex to clean it up as we have no way to delete all posts by a user.

Also we have been getting hit by spam a lot lately and the mods aren't on 24/7 so we get to it when we are on and stuff has been reported.


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## TedEH

I'm curious where the big influx of spam getting through is coming from - last time I ran any forum software and got completely bombarded by spam, I was able to cut pretty much all of it by changing the sign-up procedure. Did the new software change the way signing up works?


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## technomancer

Either it has slacked off or Alex tightened up the signup process as there has been substantially less the last couple of days


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## _MonSTeR_

technomancer said:


> It depends. If the software flags posts as spam it is easy for the mods to clean up... if like the bot with 90+ posts where it doesn't get flagged by the system then we have to wait for Alex to clean it up as we have no way to delete all posts by a user.
> 
> Also we have been getting hit by spam a lot lately and the mods aren't on 24/7 so we get to it when we are on and stuff has been reported.



Don't you guys have a "one click clean and ban" button? other forums have those just for dealing with spammers, if not, is it a forum software thing or a "admin rights" thing?


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## technomancer

_MonSTeR_ said:


> Don't you guys have a "one click clean and ban" button? other forums have those just for dealing with spammers, if not, is it a forum software thing or a "admin rights" thing?



We do... IF the system has flagged the poster as spam. We had one case where the system for some reason didn't pick up the bot.


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## MFB

technomancer said:


> Either it has slacked off or Alex tightened up the signup process as there has been substantially less the last couple of days



If I had to guess, they were probably hitting his whole hive of forums and not just our special little nest, so when the folks over at MLP or any of the other dozen ones also start chirping up as well, it was probably changed on all of them


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## technomancer

Nope must have just been a lull, we're back to getting a bunch of them every day again. Honestly getting tired of cleaning them up...


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## couverdure

Enough is enough.


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## drmosh

Kinda getting out of hand, the General Music Discussion page is not even worth looking at today...


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## TedEH

^ I'm not seeing quite as much as everyone else, but I've been using the ignore feature. Not idea, but it helps.


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## drmosh

TedEH said:


> ^ I'm not seeing quite as much as everyone else, but I've been using the ignore feature. Not idea, but it helps.



I guess they deleted them all, it's fine now


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## technomancer

My favorite: when the guys bitching about spam don't bother to report it so we can clean it up.


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## jaxadam

technomancer said:


> My favorite: when the guys bitching about spam don't bother to report it so we can clean it up.



I'm not bitching... I've got a small pharmacy of Chinese ephedra on the way!


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## drmosh

technomancer said:


> My favorite: when the guys bitching about spam don't bother to report it so we can clean it up.



I always try to report things when I see them, but when 60% of the front page is spam I really can't report every post, and wonder what the mods are doing


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## technomancer

drmosh said:


> I always try to report things when I see them, but when 60% of the front page is spam I really can't report every post, and wonder what the mods are doing



We're not compensated to do anything here, so while you "don't have time to report" the threads we're supposed to take time to go through and remove the threads one at a time (which is what the interface requires) in a speedy manner early in the morning on a week day? In all seriousness fuck you.

I was doing things clearly less important than ss.org like going to my job at 7:30AM local time.


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## drmosh

technomancer said:


> We're not compensated to do anything here, so while you "don't have time to report" the threads we're supposed to take time to go through and remove the threads one at a time (which is what the interface requires) in a speedy manner early in the morning on a week day? In all seriousness fuck you.



Christ, calm down. It wasn't an attack on you or any mod.
I've always reported shitty posts and spam, take your anger out on someone else. I am pointing out that when half the front page is spam, I cannot realistically report every post. Truth be told, I shouldn't have to. But that's not your or any other mod's fault, it's the admins.
I also don't know what the mod tools look like, neither am I a mod.
But thanks for the insult


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## technomancer

Thank you to those of you that are reporting these, it makes it faster to clean up than going through the forums and looking for them.

Alex does supposedly have a developer on the team now that is working on this. No idea if anything will come of it.


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## Randy

_MonSTeR_ said:


> Don't you guys have a "one click clean and ban" button? other forums have those just for dealing with spammers, if not, is it a forum software thing or a "admin rights" thing?



Even still, it's a process. The old spammers used to have one account and make several threads at a time, so you could "one click delete/ban" and wipe them all out. All the spam since the XenForo transition has been a separate account, separate IP per thread, so if there's 20 spam posts, you need to delete each one individually. And that wouldn't be so bad but it's not "one click". It's 'view reports > view reported item > view content > mark as spam > confirm deletion" and every step opens the next one in a new tab, so you can have 4 or 5 tabs open by the time you clean one post. Imagine that multiplied out times the dozen+ spam posts I wake up to.

FWIW, I appreciate the people who are reporting the posts because it makes finding them a lot easier. In that respect it's a team effort between the posters here and the mods. And also FWIW, I wasnt always a moderator either and I got here BY reporting posts, so I've been there.


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## TedEH

I only ran a forum for a very short period of time, but we got overrun with spam at some point too. Solution was to change the sign-up process to make it harder to automate new accounts. I dunno what the signup process on this site is, but there's bound to be a way to add some extra layers to the signup as a prevention measure, if nobody is considering that already.


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## bostjan

Something like they have for ordering pizza online...


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## couverdure

technomancer said:


> My favorite: when the guys bitching about spam don't bother to report it so we can clean it up.


I actually do report them, every FREAKING time. This is particularly getting worse today because I saw 13(!) spam threads.


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## technomancer

Sorry guys we do what we can but Alex is the only one that can fix this.


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## PBC

Is it possible that there can to be a grace period for new users. For example, a user must cannot post at all until 3 days after account creation? Or some kind of regex so that threads with "Http" in the title can't be published? 

You guys are doing what you can. I'll do my best to keep reporting.


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## bostjan

PBC said:


> Is it possible that there can to be a grace period for new users. For example, a user must cannot post at all until 3 days after account creation? Or some kind of regex so that threads with "Http" in the title can't be published?
> 
> You guys are doing what you can. I'll do my best to keep reporting.


I mean, even an hour delay would probably cause most spammers to lose interest. The ones who push through a one hour delay, I imagine, would push through a 3 day delay.

There are a lot of filters and such to ferret out spam pretty effectively. I don't even think the "http://" title is the clearest indicator, necessarily, of spam, but reading those posts, there are a lot of words and a very specific nonsense sort of word choice that makes it very clear.

But, it'd take a site administrator to implement these sorts of controls, and I'm not certain that any of them would be fast to implement, given the new architecture, but I just don't know how the new architecture works.


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## TedEH

bostjan said:


> I mean, even an hour delay would probably cause most spammers to lose interest.


I don't think it would help much if the spam is automated. It's pretty trivial to have a spam bot wait an arbitrary amount of time before posting. It's much harder to get a bot through complicated signup processes though.


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## bostjan

TedEH said:


> I don't think it would help much if the spam is automated. It's pretty trivial to have a spam bot wait an arbitrary amount of time before posting. It's much harder to get a bot through complicated signup processes though.


Pretty much what I was thinking, even if that's not the way it came out. The thing about the spambots, though, is that, if they don't expect to have to wait an arbitrary amount of time, they won't. And most of these accounts are opening up and posting immediately. That could be used as a way to flag new accounts.
I'm all for whichever controls knock out some of the spam. I think the last twenty or so online accounts I created all required either email verification or captcha.


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## Dredg

What if we deputized a few users to act as spam hunters only?


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