Why are we being overrun by spambots lately? (Read 979 times)

I think Eric has been surfing Natalie Portman sites from the server.  He's a very naughty boy.

 That could have been so many of us. 

Please don't blame Eric.

I don't know why there's a sudden uptick of spam lately.  RA has been relatively immune to spam for various reasons, one of which I'm sure is its custom forum.  It's not worth the spammer's time to write a spambot just for one site.

All of the recent spams appear to be manually entered, which is good.  I looked at the spammers' info and found something suspicious.  There are some 120 accounts originated from the same subnet/24.  All of them are created over a span of 6 months.  Most of these accounts are not active.  I wonder if the spammers were laying the ground works for the future.

I'm not sure what I can do to prevent these spams without affecting legitimate users.  Thoughts?

I don't know what can be done on the technical side, Eric.

But you have done the best thing a leader can do: created loyalty built on your genuine care for the site.  Many of us know you literally work around the clock on this site, so you have many loyal eyes watching with you.

All of the recent spams appear to be manually entered, which is good.  I looked at the spammers' info and found something suspicious.  There are some 120 accounts originated from the same subnet/24.  All of them are created over a span of 6 months.  Most of these accounts are not active.  I wonder if the spammers were laying the ground works for the future.

 

I'm not sure what I can do to prevent these spams without affecting legitimate users.  Thoughts?

Maybe delete inactive(= without a traininglog )  users after a while, say 3 months. It is not a 100% solution, but it might  help against the manually entered spam.

Tying posting privileges to log activity, for example, could restrict some of the most valuable forum participants such as Nobby, or others who visit less often but still make valuable contributions. Pete Magill regularly links to RunningAhead threads and likely sends some very knowledgeable traffic this way who probably don't log their miles here.

If the admins have the capacity, just deleting the spam posts and banning the e-mail address associated with the users may be sufficient. If RA makes it inconvenient enough, there are plenty of other sites the spammers can post where they won't face censure.

True.  And many of those with logs actually bring down the overall quality of the discussions here.  Like me, for example...

Quantity is the new quality.

As Mr. H and Jeff said, any automated schemes will either not work because these are not bots, or will end up hassling real users.  The best I can do for now is censor the topics as they're created.

All of the recent spams are from two parties (one in Israel and the other in Netherlands) so I blocked their IPs.  We'll see how long before they figure that out.