Reporting Spam

Bells

Bells

Staff member
Firstly, I would like to say thank you! It is a great help to us, especially for the spammers who try to hide their spam in other people's threads.

Your reports of those spammers are greatly appreciated by those of us on the staff here.

Secondly, if you report a spam post/thread and you do not get a resolution letter from us about it, there may be a few reasons for that. I tend to just go through and look at each new post and review them to try to weed out the spammers, so quite often, those that have been reported will be automatically resolved when I ban the spammer. So if you have reported those posts and you just see the post disappear, the lack of resolved note is often because most us tend to deal with the spammers in block when we log into the site and just go through the posts or threads themselves and delete and ban from there, and it auto resolves the report without sending a note from us specifically.. I tend to do this before I go through the reports and check each one again and catch the very many that I have missed. We aren't doing it to be rude, so please, do not assume that your participation in eliminating the spammers is not appreciated or needed because we do not respond personally to those particular reports.

Finally, I cannot say enough how much the participation of members has helped us identify problem spammers and those who hide their posts in particular ways in other people's threads or even in their own profiles. We really appreciate it.

So.. Thank you! And keep up the great job in helping us nail the odious little turds from this site.:D
 
Talk about funny coinkdinks. I'd just reported some generic 'get swoll' spam when I saw this thread. Good to know it's appreciated.
 
Forum software prevents one from making consecutive posts within a short time - twenty seconds? fifteen? I presume this is an anti-spam feature. It is therefore ironic that the same feature prevents one doing rapid Reporting of multiple spam items as fast as one could without the feature. It's so annoying I usually give up after the third reporting.
 
I'm getting good at spotting 1st post spam. It seems to come in waves every few days. Usually in the early AM, at least on my screen's clock. Also interesting is fact that the ID of poster is not only new to me, but with high probability two separate words. I just delete their new thread, and leave note that the poster needs a perma-ban, but don't know how to do that or want to slow down my cleaning efforts. On a "good day" I can kill 6 new first post spam in 20 minutes. Some times Emos has beaten me to doing this. He lives in the Netherland and often is cleaning 1st post spam when I in Brazil get up.
 
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Ophiolite said:
Forum software prevents one from making consecutive posts within a short time - twenty seconds? fifteen? I presume this is an anti-spam feature. It is therefore ironic that the same feature prevents one doing rapid Reporting of multiple spam items as fast as one could without the feature. It's so annoying I usually give up after the third reporting.
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I have to concur with this. I just tried reporting 3 spam threads in a row and had the same problem.
 
If the spam threads are all in the same sub-forum, you don't have to report them all - simply state in the report itself that there is X number of spam threads at present :)
 
Kittamaru said:
If the spam threads are all in the same sub-forum, you don't have to report them all - simply state in the report itself that there is X number of spam threads at present :)
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Potentially useful, but as I almost always pay no attention to what forum a post is in, and little attention to who wrote it, but focus upon the content I don't notice that. On the couple of occasions I have taken note of the chosen forum they appeared to have been shotgunned across many. But Ill keep it in mind.
 
Ophiolite said:
Potentially useful, but as I almost always pay no attention to what forum a post is in, and little attention to who wrote it, but focus upon the content I don't notice that. On the couple of occasions I have taken note of the chosen forum they appeared to have been shotgunned across many. But Ill keep it in mind.
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No problem :) Just offering up an alternative is all :)
 
I was mainly commenting because I couldn't find any other threads I felt an urge to post in - perhaps I should report my own post as it comes dangerously close to spam.:) Perhaps I'll start a thread to discuss how members search for posts of interest.
 
I realize that mods have very different physical locations, and schedules can be a bitch. On the forums I have a hand in, my first thing in the morning routine is to check every new post no matter where in the forum it is, and work from there.

I've noticed here that y'all seem to get most of the idiot one-offs during the USA early morning hours. Do y'all try to schedule your 'bot and spammer deletion, or is it just catch as catch can?
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Dr_Toad said:
I realize that mods have very different physical locations, and schedules can be a bitch. On the forums I have a hand in, my first thing in the morning routine is to check every new post no matter where in the forum it is, and work from there.

I've noticed here that y'all seem to get most of the idiot one-offs during the USA early morning hours. Do y'all try to schedule your 'bot and spammer deletion, or is it just catch as catch can?
scratch.gif
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When I get on in the AM, I try to go through each sub-forum and find / eliminate the spam :)
 
Dr_Toad said:
I realize that mods have very different physical locations, and schedules can be a bitch. On the forums I have a hand in, my first thing in the morning routine is to check every new post no matter where in the forum it is, and work from there.

I've noticed here that y'all seem to get most of the idiot one-offs during the USA early morning hours. Do y'all try to schedule your 'bot and spammer deletion, or is it just catch as catch can?
scratch.gif
Click to expand...
I check each new post posted every time I log in, I then go through the members online list to week out the spammers who are online at that given time. It is very tedious.

I literally delete and ban dozens a day.

And sadly, it is a catch as catch can. We can only get them once they begin to register on the forum or if they manage to post.
 
I would also note, regarding Dr. Toad's inquiry, that most of the spam is coming from Asia and the subcontinent; apparently the humans running the spambots have regular work hours, too.

Some nights I'll check out around midnight Pacific, and if I happen to come back around 0200, the spamflood is in full effect.

In the end, a lot of days what I end up doing is cleaning up the tracks; imagine seeing the stickies at the top of the list, and then nothing but deletion notes; hard-delete the threads in order to get rid of the spam deletion notes, and you have another page. If I skip it for a few days, the first three pages of GS&T will be 90% spamtracks. I will try to remember to grab a screenshot next time that happens. (There's one track on GS&T page 1 at present, and I'm about to clear it.)

Meanwhile, I owe a round of pints to my colleagues who happen to be here in the thick of it, and thus perform the vast majority of the spamkill.
 
Tiassa - I'm going to make publicly known my ignorance of the current forum software but...

hard delete vs regular delete - I guess I'm missing something with it - I normally just use the "spam" function, as I was under the impression it hard-deletes... is that not the case?
 
I just look down the listed last post of all the forums. Some are dumb and tell there is new X that helps a lot with Y in the title, but another "give away" is they almost always have two short names for the new poster, whose name is new to me. I just used the "delete thread" in the thread tools pull down, and note that the poster needs a perma-ban. More in my post 7 here about typical characteristics I catch and kill. I think that must be a "hard delete" as when done thread is gone - not even notice that thread has been removed from "public view."
 
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