Simple solution to the spambots.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

Why not make it so you can only post once every ten minutes or so, with a warning if you try to post more. If you try to post three times in a ten minute period your account gets suspended from the forums. It has several benefits.

1. It would put a stop to the spambots, at least until they reprogram them to the time limit. Which would give LL a chance to ban them.
2. It would give everyone a forced cool down period. Which is a good thing. 

 

Anyway, that's just an idea that popped into my head this morning. 

[Monti Messmer]

Hi, i thougth there is already such a limitation ? Maybe not ...

Why not use one of their amazing word-filters we have to fiddle with on the marketplace ?

I cannot use German characters on the German forum but they can use funny things.

It would be too easy i guess ;-)

Monti

[Storm Clarence]

How about a simpler solution to limit OP's ("start a new thread") to three per hour per each credential entered.

Or purchase/write a functional filter.

 

[Ren Toxx]

Agree, except that I'd extend the new thread posting wait to at least 1 hour rather than just 10 minutes.

[Sassy Romano]

I filed a jira on this the other day because it's beyond a joke.  Not that that will invoke any effort at all from LL, that's the first problem, getting them to actually recognise that a problem exists, solving it would be easy.

[KarenMichelle Lane]

---

Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

Why not make it so you can only post once every ten minutes or so, with a warning if you try to post more. If you try to post three times in a ten minute period your account gets suspended from the forums. It has several benefits.

1. It would put a stop to the spambots, at least until they reprogram them to the time limit. Which would give LL a chance to ban them.
2. It would give everyone a forced cool down period. Which is a good thing. 

 

Anyway, that's just an idea that popped into my head this morning. 

---

Drake,

 

"Why not make it so you can only post once every ten minutes" - I would have to quit as a SL Answers Volunteer Staffer. When I do SL Answers Support I beat that frequency of posts.

[KarenMichelle Lane]

Simple option:

There used to be an algorithm that examined a post or email or letter or word processing document and calculated the Fuzz or Noise factor of the text sample. Most of the Escort SPAMBOT posts would have set off that threshold. Just wondering it it was still around. I remember using it back in my Word Perfect word processing days.

Isn't there a Heuristics based scanner that can be used these days to evaluate a post for a similar threshold?

[steph Arnott]

Pay someone real monies to monitor the forums for spam after all these forums are for the benefit of LL.

[Marigold Devin]

---

steph Arnott wrote:

Pay someone real monies to monitor the forums for spam after all these forums are for the benefit of LL.

---

There are enough people who would de-spam the forums for free - after all it would save stress/time to be able to click/off the spam while answering the queries. You can even tell which avatar is most likely to spam just by looking at the list of avatars logged into the forums, without having to have fancy schmancy software.  The spammers always know exactly when there is no moderator looking in.

However, LL mistrusts the lot of us (they don't even seem to trust their own team judging by how easily they've let previous Linden people go :matte-motes-sour:  )

[steph Arnott]

Marigold Devin

However, LL mistrusts the lot of us (they don't even seem to trust their own team judging by how easily they've let previous Linden people go  )

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Which is why nothing will ever get sorted.

[Marigold Devin]

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steph Arnott wrote:

Marigold Devin

However, LL mistrusts the lot of us (they don't even seem to trust their own team judging by how easily they've let previous Linden people go 

**Only uploaded images may be used in postings**://secondlife.i.lithium.com/html/assets/emoticons/mattemotes/sour.png" border="0" alt=":matte-motes-sour:" title="" />

  )

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Which is why nothing will ever get sorted.

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Yes. You are right. *sighs* :matte-motes-impatient:

[Storm Clarence]

Fancy schmancy?  :-))

[Marigold Devin]

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Storm Clarence wrote:

Fancy schmancy?  :-))

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Whupps 

Fancy Schmancy )

[Pussycat Catnap]

When I used to moderate a forum professionally I found only a few things that actually worked:

 

1. Put a Captcha system onto account creation. This cut about 1000-bot account creatins per dayt down to maybe 10 per week. It can be hacked through, but the spammers with such tools are much rarer.

2. Require the first post be manually approved. This killed spam 100%. When I enabled this, I had no spammers. It was just that easy. It only took requiring one legit post to kill them off. Why? Because humans are not running them. They will have 100 bots post a message, and no one every checks the success. If they sit in moderation or get denied... the spam company doesn't bother to manually make a real post, they just move on. They're working hundreds of thousands of these per hour across the web...

3. There is no 3. Every other solution failed. The head of marketing where I worked HATED the two ideas above, so I had to try dozens of different things and bring him regular spreadsheets and logs with the results. As a result I pretty much went through every solution I could have IT code in, and every thing I could find commercially or open source, and a few simply crazy notions. At the end of the day - I more or less came back to "this is all that works."

3a. That said one other things almost works. But its a suicide pill solution. Destroy your own SEO. When I made our forum hostile to SEO, pulled it from search, and made it hard for our regular users to navigate to... about half the spam bots pulled us out of their list. But we lost most of our regulars too - because I had to make the place just plain unfriendly to use... I got spam down to about 1 per day, but legit posts down to about 1 every 2 days... So this sort of works... but is not worth what you have to do to get there.

 

 

[Phil Deakins]

Three posts per 10 minutes would foul up the forum for many people, so it's a bad idea, imo.

There already is an anti-flood bit in place.

Limiting the number of new threads that a user can start within a period of time, as someone suggested, is a good idea, imo.

 

[Phil Deakins]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

3a. That said one other things almost works. But its a suicide pill solution. Destroy your own SEO. When I made our forum hostile to SEO, pulled it from search, and made it hard for our regular users to navigate to... about half the spam bots pulled us out of their list. But we lost most of our regulars too - because I had to make the place just plain unfriendly to use... I got spam down to about 1 per day, but legit posts down to about 1 every 2 days... So this sort of works... but is not worth what you have to do to get there. 

---

There is no need to anti-seo the forum. Using the robots.txt file to prvent the major engines from crawling and indexing it would probably reduce the spam to next to nothing, but it would take time. There is no need for this forum to be indexed by the search engines so taking it out of them would be effective.

Your #1 thought: a captcha system has been suggested very many times, so LL is simply not going to do it.

Your #2 thought won't happen either because it would require more hands-on than LL want (will pay for). Also, it would be bad for this particular forum, imo, because SL users who want answers, and who haven't posted before, need them quickly, without having to wait for a moderator to turn up and ok their posts. I don't like the idea for this forum - especially when thre ar much altrnatives, such as a captcha or a limit on new threads within a timeframe. Especially the captcha.

[PeterCanessa Oh]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

- because I had to make the place just plain unfriendly to use... 

 

 

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This stuff is pretty bad, especially in Answers.  Bring 'unfriendly' on, we can take it - hell, we even manage to keep SL working on our machines *grin*

Thanks for a particularly interesting post.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

3a. That said one other things almost works. But its a suicide pill solution. Destroy your own SEO. When I made our forum hostile to SEO, pulled it from search, and made it hard for our regular users to navigate to... about half the spam bots pulled us out of their list. But we lost most of our regulars too - because I had to make the place just plain unfriendly to use... I got spam down to about 1 per day, but legit posts down to about 1 every 2 days... So this sort of works... but is not worth what you have to do to get there. 

---

There is no need to anti-seo the forum. Using the robots.txt file to prvent the major engines from crawling and indexing it would probably reduce the spam to next to nothing, but it would take time. There is no need for this forum to be indexed by the search engines so taking it out of them would be effective.

---

That had no impact when tried. robots.txt is an optional thing. If you're still valuable to SEO, bots will still hit you. Been there with this one - it was 'too obvious' so something we tried early on.

 

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Phil Deakins wrote:

Your #1 thought: a captcha system has been suggested very many times, so LL is simply not going to do it.

Your #2 thought won't happen either because it would require more hands-on than LL want (will pay for).

---

Whether or not they will do it was not my point. My point is that is the only thing that will work. They can waste all the time and money they want on other solutions. None will work. Once you're on the SEO-spambot list, you can't get off unless you have bad SEO (and even then only the bots that do re-passes of effectiveness will pull you from their lists), or you moderate. Don't moderate, then accept spam as a fact of life.

The moderation that did work was trivial in impact: Your first post ever was the only one we moderated. Your first post showed up in my admin queue, I'd glance at it for about 3 seconds and hit 'block' or 'approve'. I'd then go through the blocked ones and ban the account and their IPs 2 levels up. So if your IP was 000.000.000.000, I'd ban 000.000.*.*

People often say IP addresses are not static and change, so that would be unfair. But I sat looking at them day in and day out - and they were static up to that level, and such bans not once ever turned up one of our real customers (we were an e-commerce and education site, I had data to show this).

- In a year and a half of admining that, I had exactly one complaint, and zero drop in regular user traffic. In fact regular user traffic went up once the spammers faded away. The one complaint was a from a user who posted at somewhere between midnight at 2am his local time, on a Friday, and complained Saturday morning that approval took too long - which I didn't see until Monday. Given the nature of that business we dismissed him as unreasonable.

Here? You could toss it either way. I'd say a simple notice saying new users are only approved Monday-Friday during PST business hours is fine. The posting level here is LESS than what I dealth with - and a single admin could handle the approval system as a minor part of their workload. My official task there was a graphic design / SEO one. I got saddled with all of this merely because I'd designed to visual of the forum, and no one else wanted to touch it with a 10-foot pole... Managing it after I had my moderation in place took about 10 minutes a day. Before, when I had to find spammers after the fact, about 2 hours a day...

 

But I agree they won't ever do it.

It is still however, what works.

 

[Phil Deakins]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

---

Phil Deakins wrote:

---

Pussycat Catnap wrote:

3a. That said one other things almost works. But its a suicide pill solution. Destroy your own SEO. When I made our forum hostile to SEO, pulled it from search, and made it hard for our regular users to navigate to... about half the spam bots pulled us out of their list. But we lost most of our regulars too - because I had to make the place just plain unfriendly to use... I got spam down to about 1 per day, but legit posts down to about 1 every 2 days... So this sort of works... but is not worth what you have to do to get there. 

---

There is no need to anti-seo the forum. Using the robots.txt file to prvent the major engines from crawling and indexing it would probably reduce the spam to next to nothing, but it would take time. There is no need for this forum to be indexed by the search engines so taking it out of them would be effective.

---

That had no impact when tried. robots.txt is an optional thing. If you're still valuable to SEO, bots will still hit you. Been there with this one - it was 'too obvious' so something we tried early on.

---

I did say it would take time to be effective but I do believe it would be effective eventually. The robots.txt file will only prevent those search engines that abide by the protocol, and the major engines do abide by it. Once a site does not show in the major engines, I'm sure that the spambots will eventually fade away, but it's not a short term solution. I've never tried it though, because it's always been necessary for my sites to rank high in the search results. A captcha system is an immediate solution, but LL has shown no desire to get rid of the spam.

[Innula Zenovka]

As I understand it, Captcha systems are easily circumented and do more to frustrate legitimate users than spammers.

I don't think there's any reliable solution that doesn't involve human intervention at some point, but that raises the question of why would we expect LL to pay someone to zap spam in the forums 24/7 when they don't keep the live chat open round the clock?   

[Pussycat Catnap]

Once we had a modified robots.txt, we kept it there for as long as I was working there. 2 years. No impact.

Then again, the forum there, and the one here, are very valuable for the SEO of both businesses. I know we had top notch SEO there because I ran it and got that company a boost of 50% in total profits. I have a pattern/analogy brain that makes "big data" intuitive but details often less so.

As with here, we could not use a robots.txt to completely pull the forum from search. That IS an SEO poison pill. And it kills all corporate value in having a forum - which is largely about boosting your retentive traffic and making you more relevant to likely customers by increasing the user-value of your site, and proving its high relevancy to search.

Kill your forum's searchm is killing much of a community site's SEO.

We had a competing third party forum, much as a well known one for SL gives this place a competing third party forum. We knew quite well that people interested in our product's topc had better conversation and information on the third party site - but ours was still more value-added as it had relevant conversation tied to products that readers on both sites wanted. Keeping that meant keeping the forum searchable and SEO strong.

So yeah, had robots.txt in there for 2 years - but it had to be limited by the nature of the business to things like profiles, login pages, and so on. It cost the company about $10k in the week we tried killing the forum from search alltogether.

 

[Phil Deakins]

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Innula Zenovka wrote:

As I understand it, Captcha systems are easily circumented and do more to frustrate legitimate users than spammers.

I don't think there's any reliable solution that doesn't involve human intervention at some point, but that raises the question of why would we expect LL to pay someone to zap spam in the forums 24/7 when they don't keep the live chat open round the clock?   

---

And as I understand it, captcha systems do reduce auto-spam.

[Phil Deakins]

There is no value to this forum in being in the search engine results. It has its own built-in users and has no need to attract any others to it. So taking it out of the engines would be perfectly fine. Apparently, the forum you manged was not like this one, in that it (or the site as a whole) needed to attract new people due to the business nature. Forums are excellent producers of genuine pages, and the more pages a site has in the engines' indexes, the better for rankings. I won't go into details but it's true.

Maybe your modified robots.txt file didn't prevent the forum from being indexed by the engines. I'm only taking about removing this forum from the search engines altogether as there is no need for this forum to be in them.

[Innula Zenovka]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

---

Innula Zenovka wrote:

As I understand it, Captcha systems are easily circumented and do more to frustrate legitimate users than spammers.

I don't think there's any reliable solution that doesn't involve human intervention at some point, but that raises the question of why would we expect LL to pay someone to zap spam in the forums 24/7 when they don't keep the live chat open round the clock?   

---

And as I understand it, captcha systems do reduce auto-spam.

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Possibly so overall, but they are easily circumvented.   This article on ZDNet is a bit outdated, perhaps, but such services still seem to be going strong and are widely available (the one I just installed to test, on a free trial basis, as an extension for Google Chrome certainly works).    I find it hard to believe that commercial spammers, like the ones attacking these forums, don't make use of such services.

[jujmental]

Why not make potential posters take a combined IQ/language test before they are allowed to post?

Ah, that's right, there'd only be about a dozen of us here.

© The Judge - who has had ZERO spam make it through to his maibox in the last five years, because he uses Bayesian filters.