What's up with all of the SPAM recently???

[Jayson]

Just curious. It never use to be an issue, but it seems the last couple weeks the forum is really getting nailed. What's up?

[Sheiky]

The last couple of weeks it definitely looks to be increasing. I guess normally the amount of SPAM could be handled better by the admins.
Anyway, the (failed) update to new forum software might be the answer to it

If we just submit more photos you wouldn't notice the spam that much

Edit: Only realised just now that there are loads of SPAM post. Not the regular one or two that I was expecting...

[ahab1372]

Admins cannot be monitoring the forum 24/7, and Spammers post mostly automatically. I guess they even register automatically. New forum software might make that harder to accomplish, until spammers catch up with technology. It is like an arms-race.
Not sure if it would help if more members volunteered to be spam-cops, I certainly would be willing to help.

[Sheiky]

To be fair, the admins around here are very fast. The spam-bots keep getting better and better that's for sure. In this case most of the new spam is made under 1 or 2 accounts rather than 10 accounts with one post each. I assume that's easier to fix?
Hopefully the next forum software update will succeed and hopefully it helps out.
I had the same thing with the guestbook on my website. On some point I got like 1 spam message a day and it was manageable until it went up like crazy from one day onto another. Hopefully it's fixeable, my guestbook wasn't

[Dr Croubie]

CR forums just put in a new system, basically if there's a link in the post that links to a "known spam link", then the post has to be reviewed by a mod before it can be seen on the forum. They're having a few troubles with it, because they didn't write their own list and some people are complaining that legitimate links get flagged as well.

I reckon the easiest thing would be just to have auto-mod-review on for any new-members' first 10 posts that contain a link. So, you sign up a new account, you have 10 posts to prove you're not a spambot, then your posts don't need review anymore. We can even create our own 'whitelist' of sites to which people here might link (flickr, smugmug, B+H, etc) that we know aren't spam. Presuming that's all possible within the confines of the forums software, of course.

[Sean Setters]

The first thing I did to try and lessen the SPAM activity was change the verification method to reCAPTCHA. Unfortunately reCAPTCHA has been cracked. And on that note, I've reverted back to a question/answer type of human verification system for new member registration.

There are indeed a couple of security holes in the version of vBulletin that we are currently using.

When I attempted to update the software a few days ago, things did not go as planned (to say the least). The update broke the navigation links throughout the community pages. We had to do a full restore. We still believe upgrading the software is a good start to eventually alleviating the problem--that's why we're going to try it again once we have feel we are more prepared for the problems that that may arise.

My hat goes off to the forum moderators--they've been doing a more than admirable job of keeping the forums clean against a constant flow of attacks.

-Sean

[btaylor]

Yep good work guys. I help to manage another forum and it's hard work to keep things up and running smoothly all the time. I will have a chat to some of the guys to find out more about what we're doing to manage spam and if anything helpful comes about from that I'll PM you Sean.

[HDNitehawk]

CR forums just put in a new system, basically if there's a link in the post that links to a "known spam link", then the post has to be reviewed by a mod before it can be seen on the forum. They're having a few troubles with it, because they didn't write their own list and some people are complaining that legitimate links get flagged as well.

I think TDP's spam is much more informative than a large portion of the posts and trolling on CR.
At least the spam isn't tolling that Nikon viagra is better than Canon viagra. Post the topic on CR and you would get a debate.

[Dr Croubie]

I think TDP's spam is much more informative than a large portion of the posts and trolling on CR.
At least the spam isn't tolling that Nikon viagra is better than Canon viagra. Post the topic on CR and you would get a debate.

As long as the debate isn't over which camera works better in the dark to capture the action once the drugs kicked in...

[HDNitehawk]

As long as the debate isn't over which camera works better in the dark to capture the action once the drugs kicked in...

I think I have actually seen that thread on CR. They aren't as family friendly as TDP.