The Work in Progress Forum suffers from a lot of spam lately. I usually report it and it can take anywhere from minutes to hours until it is deleted. Due to the amount of spam it makes browsing WIP a more and more annoying.
I was wondering if there are any measures that can be taken to prevent this spam since it is usually of the same nature (Arabic texts with some numbers and English stuff). Thinking of IP blocks, disallow non-latin text, captcha for new users that post, etc?
Attached an image of how WIP looks at the moment of writing.
If I remember correctly, CGTalk forums used to require admin approval for the the first three posts. That seemed to work well as spam was rare over there.
Also blocking or requiring extra verification from all new users with Egyptian IPs might work in this particular case. Admins might actually be doing the spammers a favor by saving them the effort, because I don’t think spam works for advertising phone numbers.
It’s actually decreased from a while back. It’s been so long since I signed up that I don’t know if they’ve added capchas to forum membership sign up or not but the perpetrators obviously don’t think too much of the intelligence on the forums.
The persistence and stupidity of the repeated spamming is more indicative of a political attack than a criminal attempt to phish attack (or SEO attack). It’s probably a government or a government funded organization(s). Apparently someone does not like the content of most of the games being created in Unity or at least those being discussed in the forums.
Do they really think we are going buy some refrigerators if they just keep coming back? It’s in damn Arabic, none of us can read it and google translate sucks for Arabic.
It is most likely some standard forum system is running in the background. And thus must have some good options. However seeing the WIP at this very moment I think indicates that it is not a question of if or when something has to be done, but rather what.
Edit: I also regulary get this message when I try to report spam:
We know we get a lot of spam, please report it as soon as you see it.
As a background for anyone who doesn’t know, we are changing forum software soon. Why? To fix this problem (and other bugs) and to give us more flexibility in changing things when you ask for it, and a heap of other reasons the web devs gave me one day.
So for those who do know we are doing this, and it seems like it’s been forever since we said we were moving to XenForo, we have a test version up and running with our account system patched in and a dump of all VB’s data. It still needs to be styled but we are starting to run it through QA, so its coming. It will also look and behave quite differently from these forums so prepare your internet change hate, we will of course keep all your posts and data.
I’ll be making a thread soon about this new forum once we get closer, for now keep your conversation about this in one place. We know we have a problem and there isn’t much we can do apart from keep deleting posts. (In the new forums we can set up filters to scan for things and instantly put them in moderation, I’ve never been so excited about a forum feature in my life!)
Most of the time all of the spam is from one or two user accounts, so you should only need to report one of their posts and everything they’ve posted will get deleted when someone is able.
