Fighting spam in the community

One thing I notice is that although the spams are deleted, they remain visible in the today page and that unlike the messages themselves, the "more" option against those messages in the today page does not change to indicate whether the messages have already been reported.

Corel probably cannot do anything to change that, but I think it should probably be flagged back to the software authors to fix.

I think they could also consider detecting if two or more messages by the same author or from the same IP range are flagged as abuse by different users. Then, any other messages posted by that user or IP range on the same day should be quarantined until released by admin.

So far, the spammers have been flagged as such, and their posts are hidden in the forum. I have also blocked a whole set of IP addresses and have updated the spam filter rules with the new keywords and frequent posts. The problem seems that this was a concerted effort to post spam in the community, involving at least 12 different computers and as many different unique accounts, all happening very quickly.

I am now in the process of actually deleting the actual posts. Once that is done, they should dissapear from the Today view (except if you have admin access to the deleted posts). At that point, I will also do one more review of all the spam filters and rules we have in place... it's always a balancing act of having too much go for moderations (especially from the legit participants) vs letting spam through. For example, should a use be allowed to post once every 2 minutes, 5 minutes or 15 minutes?

Gérard

Gerard,

Adobe's forums (and Apple, and ...) went through these Asian spammers a few weeks ago, and you are not alone this weekend (Serif forums for instance). In Adobe's case, there were tens of thousands of posts, all happening faster than they could deal with it. Ended up they paid for a custom filter. Hasn't been an issue since.

To the point of post timing. Several people in the Adobe forum "back-room" argued pros and cons of using the post timing as a means of temporarily slowing them down. And they did set it. In the end, it didn't help much if at all. I was with the "cons" in arguing all it would do is to slow down aiding in the forum by those of us who were regular helpers. And it did slow us down. Made it down right difficult and didn't seem to affect the spammers to speak of because they could rotate through user names and post while we all had to "play by the post timing rules."

Good luck.

Mike

Thank you Mike... somehow knowing that other forums did get hit as well doesn't make me happier... I should now have deleted all the spam post from the last 18-24 hours in the home page activity stream, and these should now only be visible to the administrators. If you see anything, please let me know ASAP.

I will also make some tweaking to the spam filters. We do pay for Akismet as an extra filter, but that was cleartly not enough this time. I've identified at least 12 different IP addresses used, and about 10-15 accounts were created (all blocked / moderated now). There is still some work in the background, but most of the visible spam should be gone.

I will fine-tune the spam filters in the next few days based on the false-positives. There might be a few more messages that get flagged for moderation than normally, and I appologize in advance for the inconvenience.

Gérard

Hi Gerard,

No worries from my end.

Fighting the spammers is mostly a behind the scene activity under normal circumstances. So my personal thanks to those working behind the scenes day to day that I'll likely never know about, and also to you, the public face @ Corel we "see."

Mike

Good job, I know it's a headache and a problem on most forums. I wish they all would stop. But it's not a perfect world. I reported one, but saw many. Looking a lot better. Appreciate the cleanup. :)