Advertising bots and such

[Reod]

Advertising bots and such

They are annoying a lot...

As we see definetly registration on this forum cant block bots ...well maybe solution for that will be hiring more mods or telling mod to delete them faster ( some of them are up for hours -.- ).Often i see moderators online but they dont delete spam post for hours...

Untill you(CDPR administrators of this forum) change forum registration somehow.

 

[Dona.794]

Yeah, the spam is annoying :/ We need better security measures.

As for mods, they are human too and cannot pay attention to new spamthreads 24/7. My profile is currently set to Offline, but you'd probably see me in user list all day because I keep forum index in a Pinned tab. Doesn't mean I check it every two seconds, though

 

[227]

Alternate solution: We kill 'em. Like, in real life. With a shovel.

I maintain that we need questions that only people know the answer to. For example, "For extended eating, do you prefer pie or cake?" Obviously a human would type in "pie," because extended periods of cake lead to frosting semi-comas. A bot wouldn't know that unless it was advanced enough to have a sense of taste, in which case we would have bigger problems than some spam.

 

[Reod]

I dont blame mods , we are all humans, i mean maybe we need more of them.

@227: Spoon would be better >.>

 

[M4xw0lf.978]

Alternate solution: We kill 'em. Like, in real life. With a shovel.

I maintain that we need questions that only people know the answer to. For example, "For extended eating, do you prefer pie or cake?" Obviously a human would type in "pie," because extended periods of cake lead to frosting semi-comas. A bot wouldn't know that unless it was advanced enough to have a sense of taste, in which case we would have bigger problems than some spam.

Damn, I wanted to +1 your post but I somehow missed
Someone fix this, pretty please?

 

[phamvan94]

Damn, I wanted to +1 your post but I somehow missed
Someone fix this, pretty please?

Done.

For spam bots, a better registration system would be required. Or more "spam mods".

 

[227]

@227: Spoon would be better >.>

Kill them with a spoon? Okay, but that takes much more hand-eye coordination because you have to aim for their eyes. Also, the shovel is convenient because you can dig their grave with it. That whole process takes considerably longer with a spoon.

But sure, you're the boss. Spoons ahoy.

Slightly more on topic, I think part of the reason mods don't always catch the spam posts is because not enough people actually report said spam. They just ignore it and post in other topics instead, allowing the spam to get buried under legitimate topics (and making it harder to see at a glance).

Damn, I wanted to +1 your post but I somehow missed

Hey, it's the thought that counts. Thankya

 

[Aver]

Any sort of CAPTCHA would resolve problem in no time and it shouldn't be too hard to do.

 

[secondchildren]

Mods are not hired, mods are voluntary and thus we cannot stay online all the time, since we have all our lives and our jobs you see

Registration here has a captcha code and a question, seems they both can be bypassed by some smart-bot scum. But the most of it is still blocked. MM360 said they can't do anything more than this, so, the only thing I can say is just having patience and reporting to moderators. Then ignore that post. We will take care of it asap

I understand your blaming, but there's nothing we can do (unless we make blow up all those agencies, industries or companies sending trash to here LOL)

take it easy

 

[jjavier]

Spam is annoying, but you can't avoid it 100%. May be you can enforce some rules to make the situation a little better.

For example:

The 3 first post of an user can't have links in it.

or

The 3 first post of an user should be approved by a moderator or an user with a reputation > 10. Meanwhile, the new user posts stays in some kind of public inbox.


I don't know how much resources CDProjekt can devote to this issue right now.

 

[Dona.794]

What scares me is that they are starting to sound like legitimate posts more and more :/ The one I reported last night was like that, but it was obviously spam... sans the links? I don't understand spam for the sake of spamming and that post did not have a SINGLE link in it.

 

[secondchildren]

Spam is annoying, but you can't avoid it 100%. May be you can enforce some rules to make the situation a little better.

For example:

The 3 first post of an user can't have links in it.

or

The 3 first post of an user should be approved by a moderator or an user with a reputation > 10. Meanwhile, the new user posts stays in some kind of public inbox.


I don't know how much resources CDProjekt can devote to this issue right now.

We have proposed this solution as well, but the problem is that some bot-scum is terribily clever and sometimes they spreads multiple poos into the forum. Just one bot once tossed 15 spam ads, time ago.

See those nonsenseful posts you see sometimes in the board, with no link or pic? yesterday, Dona reported one very very weird, about a girl whining and blaming for her self esteem problems.... those are simply bot testing. See? they're smart (but we-mods are experienced witchers, they can't win LOL)

 

[227]

MM360 said they can't do anything more than this, so, the only thing I can say is just having patience and reporting to moderators.

Other forums don't get hit by the level of spam that we do, so we're clearly missing something.

Not to be vengeful or anything, but if any of you hover over a link and see something like "ref" near the end of the URL, that's probably a referral URL. They tend to be tied to ad networks that are paranoid about people gaming the system, so a bunch of obviously automated hits to said URL would likely result in that particular bot-user being banned from the ad network altogether. Not that I'm advocating anything retaliatory like that. Just making conversation.

Evil smile.

 

[chiefje]

@227: Spoon would be better >.>

Makes me think about this :spoon killer

On-topic, I already sent a PM to MM360 asking him to see if anything can be done about the spam. After doing that I saw this thread. Oh and thanks for the hard work from the mods, the spam gets taken down pretty quickly imo. Just report them and they disappear within 5 mins

 

[Seeker.217]

Thanks you Chief. we do try to take them down as soon as we see them and sometime before a report is made
Also I like to thank those that as soon as they spot a Bot and report them to us it dose help a lot

 

[Dona.794]

Writing reports is so fun that I sometimes feel offended if you take threads down before my report can go through.

Haha, joking, continue being awesome :>

 

[Seeker.217]

Writing reports is so fun that I sometimes feel offended if you take threads down before my report can go through.

Haha, joking, continue being awesome :>

I must say some of you do come up with the unique ways in writing up these reports the are a awesome as well

 

[secondchildren]

Oh.... now that you're telling Seeker...

we can launch this sort of contest among you members: push the button for a spam in the most creative report that comes up to your head! Might be a sort of hunt for you and you can feel less annoyed by the spam trash

Winners win.... forum shaved and cleaned and joyful moderators Whee!

Okay...
if we make this serious we can even think to a prize... maybe we can ask Megatron if there's still something into the HQ storeroom

 

[dragonbird]

Are any of the mods or admins friendly with Robin over at The Nexus? They use the same forum software, don't they, but they don't seem to have as many problems. Maybe it would be worth finding out how they stop it.

 

[Aver]

Adding CAPTCHA to registration form should be easy as hell. I was able to do this on my forum even tho my coding skills are almost non existent.