Milovana.com

les wrote:
The path of happy campers and restricting ne'er do wells is never straight forward.
I mean I would never leave my front door open like my parents did for me.

No but if we are going to use the door analogy, one would tape up the letter box and make the postman do back flips over a shark infested swap just to stop junk mail hitting the doormat.

No, you're saying because we get all this junk mail we should make our new users jump through hoops. I'm saying we shouldn't do that. Let's not fluff the analogies too much and hide the true meaning of the discussion.

I'm never a fan of making changes that punish the whole community because there is spam. Spammers will find a way around any changes that are made, so adding all of these restrictions would just be hurting the people that actually follow the rules.

Dream_On wrote:I'm never a fan of making changes that punish the whole community because there is spam. Spammers will find a way around any changes that are made, so adding all of these restrictions would just be hurting the people that actually follow the rules.

Precisely, the majority should not suffer due to the actions of the people who would seek to break the rules. The current rules on spam are simple and effective. The Mods and Admins cannot be on line 24/7 to put them into action though we either need more mods around the world. Or people just need to be patient.

curiousSK wrote:i'm truly getting fed-up of seeing this link and those which are similar from what i assume to be the same person. Surely there is something we can do about it?!

        What leads us to assume whether this person is a spammer or not?

Well Les considering the Mods have deleted his posts, his account, and every last shred of his activity from the site, I'm going to take an educated guess and say he was. What do you think?

Only here to make a suggestion. Is it possible to block a single user from posting a link and/or posting topics of the same name across multiple threads more than once within a certain time period? It would cut down on the spam and would actually be non-invasive towards new and older users. We wouldn't be able to identify spammers as easily but would hinder efforts of a spammer/spam bot. It is only a thought. I really don't know if users post the same link multiple times unless quoting which can be a small issue. Thoughts?

Signed with a
Snare

Snare wrote:Only here to make a suggestion. Is it possible to block a single user from posting a link and/or posting topics of the same name across multiple threads more than once within a certain time period? It would cut down on the spam and would actually be non-invasive towards new and older users. We wouldn't be able to identify spammers as easily but would hinder efforts of a spammer/spam bot. It is only a thought. I really don't know if users post the same link multiple times unless quoting which can be a small issue. Thoughts?

Signed with a
Snare

I think if possible, this would likely be an effective way of targeting this particular spammer short term. However eventually they would see what we are doing and just change tactics. From what I can see it appears to be the same bot advertising the same website over and over. Sometimes they will post threads with the same title in different sub forums, sometimes in the same sub forum. Most of the time the titles vary. But the links are usually similar or remain the same. It's most definitely a targeted campaign.

On one level the site should see it as a positive sign that this kind of thing is happening, if the place is getting big enough that people see it as something worth targeting with advertising then it is certainly doing a good job and getting noticed. Even if that advertising is spam. It still shows that we are getting a decent amount of traffic and that people are taking note of that.

les wrote:

tokkie>>>>http://www.milovana.com/forum/memberlis ... le&u=29494
Joined and posted 18 threads in 10 minutes

Please janmb explain how this is normal behaviour.

The only member who could post this frequently is a person running a Forum game and as such all the posts would be in ongoing threads.
Not all brand new ones with identical names in different forums.

What the hell has this got to do with me?

And the user you linked to has no posts what so ever so no way I can comment on that. (presumably his spam were removed by mods as it should be)


Regarding the idea of timers, there are several drawbacks and inefficiencies with that line of thought. It may be the least useless idea to combat spam proactively, but it is still fairly useless still.

Once registered, the spammers are very likely not posting manually, but by some kind of botting software. If that is the case, a longer posting cooldown won't do much good - all it will achieve is spread the posting out a little more in time. Fair enough, ever so occasionally that may lead to the user being removed before getting to post as many posts, but most of the time you will wake up to find the same batch of posts there - just a few more minutes apart.

Secondly, as pointed out a thousand times before, posting timers hurt regular users.

Snare wrote:Only here to make a suggestion. Is it possible to block a single user from posting a link and/or posting topics of the same name across multiple threads more than once within a certain time period? It would cut down on the spam and would actually be non-invasive towards new and older users. We wouldn't be able to identify spammers as easily but would hinder efforts of a spammer/spam bot. It is only a thought. I really don't know if users post the same link multiple times unless quoting which can be a small issue. Thoughts?

Signed with a
Snare

Actually one of the better ideas I've seen. This would indeed work, and the timer could be fairly high and still very very rarely affect "real" users at all.

Harder to implement, but far from impossible.

I would like to respond to a comment.

Banquo wrote: I think if possible, this would likely be an effective way of targeting this particular spammer short term. However eventually they would see what we are doing and just change tactics. From what I can see it appears to be the same bot advertising the same website over and over. Sometimes they will post threads with the same title in different sub forums, sometimes in the same sub forum. Most of the time the titles vary. But the links are usually similar or remain the same. It's most definitely a targeted campaign.

Well the trend that I have seen with this particular spammer is 1 of 3 different topics across 1 of 3 different threads with each containing 1 of 3 links. By definition this is a spammer. Especially if this is a spam bot it is hard to replicate just changing one letter in each topic so it can post as much as it is programmed to. It would be denied the ability to create 3 different topics in seperate forums. **sidenote: I think I was saying threads when I meant forums and sub forums** The only reason I am thinking this way is to protect our rights to post as many times as we want. It will rarely mess with a new through veteran user of Milovana.

janmb wrote: Actually one of the better ideas I've seen. This would indeed work, and the timer could be fairly high and still very very rarely affect "real" users at all.

Harder to implement, but far from impossible.

Thank you for the kind words.

In the chat rooms we deal with someone posting the same link or post multiple times by kicking the user from the room, among other things if it is not a first offense. so you must understand my knowledge of spamming a forum is lacking.

Signed with a
Snare