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Is there a more effective way to get rid of spam in Jazz.net Forum?


Arne Bister (2.6k12832) | asked Feb 07 '14, 2:11 a.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
Team,

I actually found myself taking care to formulate the question so it would not immediately be flagged as spam. Recently I noticed a dramatic increase in spam. While I can report on spam, this is tedious and I may only flag 5 times a day.
The spam seems to get cleaned up effectively but whenever I look for unanswered questions there is new spam, making it hard to quickly find relevant calls for help. To boot, those spammers also fill the "recent tags" list with silly tags.

Admins to the rescue, do we have a more effective way of stopping this?

- Arne

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Ralph Schoon commented Feb 07 '14, 2:24 a.m. | edited Feb 07 '14, 2:25 a.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER

Arne,

I usually ban spam in this timezone. I had a strange network error, so I could not log into the forums. The increase you see is due to me not banning the spam from Asia-Pacific and our own time zone.

See https://jazz.net/forum/questions/122284/can-we-have-a-captcha-on-the-forum for some discussion. The attempt will be that the user has to at least validate their e-mail to be able to post, which spammers don't.

It is easy enough for me to catch the spammers. The reason above prevented me to for two weeks. Expect to get some relief as I am usually frequently monitoring the forum and ban spam.

Also see https://jazz.net/forum/questions/126164/what-should-i-do-if-i-see-spam-messages-on-the-forum and just tag the post as spam to help us, if you like.

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Ralph Schoon (63.5k33646) | answered Feb 07 '14, 2:44 a.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER
As discussed. Instead of reporting posts as spam, which has a limit, just retag the post, if you have the reputation. Remove all tags and add 'spam' as tag.
Arne Bister selected this answer as the correct answer

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Geoffrey Clemm (30.1k33035) | answered Feb 07 '14, 11:09 p.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / FORUM MODERATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER
Also, we are turning back on the requirement that you have a validated email address in order to post, which will block the more mindless spammers.

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1
sam detweiler commented Feb 08 '14, 7:28 a.m. | edited Feb 08 '14, 7:30 a.m.

but we are still getting spam

before jazz.net I lived on two other forums devoted to cars (my hobby) and in 10 years NEVER saw spam on either.

I think we HAVE  to actively moderate, put a 10 day age limit on posts from new registrations to bypass moderator review.  Once this goes into effect the spam will go away incoming cause it will never be published.

two spam reports from different users of sufficient rating points (100?) will force a user back into moderation.

and I volunteer to help moderate.


Millard Ellingsworth commented Feb 11 '14, 6:32 p.m. | edited Feb 11 '14, 6:32 p.m.
FORUM ADMINISTRATOR / JAZZ DEVELOPER

I think we get particularly targeted because there is significant traffic here. I have spoken to a couple forum admins in the last few days and they hardly ever have any spam and they aren't doing anything to block it. The spammers just aren't interested in their sites despite the fact that they could post spam freely (for a while).


So, most importantly, thanks to everyone for making this site so worthy of the attention. :-)

Know that I'm pushing forward on this issue every day. We're testing a solution that will actually vet message content and refuse anything that doesn't pass the filter test. So far the results of the filtering are promising and we want to do significantly more testing because false positives are not acceptable -- I don't want any actually interested party denied service here.


sam detweiler commented Feb 11 '14, 6:42 p.m. | edited Feb 11 '14, 6:42 p.m.

great news! we look forward to just user content.  

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