How does QATO combat spam?

Archived Forums Questions & Answers
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The person who has been spamming almost the same content to UA for ages now does it in order to:

  1. Send their spam via email in automatic Notifications to users.
  2. To get the spam injected into Google’s ranks.

Nothing that I have seen done has had any impact upon these, and the perpetrator has continued since presumably they are still satisfied with their results.

They even seem to have advanced: injecting the spam then deleting it once the emails have been sent and Google has scraped it.

Meanwhile on our side we just have good people throwing reporting/editing effort (and karma) up against the wall, and QATO running around shutting the gate after each horse bolts with a suspension of yet another fake account.

I had hoped not to have to ask the question, presuming that whatever counter-attack QATO was mounting was best done covertly. But at some point I have to wonder if it’s so super covert as to be non-existent.

So, the question is: does QATO think the current counter is working in any way at all, and is there something better they could be doing? What does SO do?

"They even seem to have advanced: injecting the spam then deleting it once the emails have been sent and Google has scraped it." Nah, I've just been deleting all of the spam as it pops up. But I agree, some sort of spam prevention ought to be implemented.

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You're probably wasting your time, since the notifications are already sent, and Google apparently scans very frequently.

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Indeed, I googled the spam text and it appears on thousands of sites stretching back months and years, so manually deleting isn't sustainable.

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I realize most of the harm has already been done, but it still stops the question from being cluttered with spam and people wondering 'wtf is this'. It also avoids people like you wasting karma on downvotes ;)

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How about DDOS-attack on the site posted in the spam? ;-) Illegal suggestions aside, if this is the same guy (evidently, it is) posting this stuff, maybe we can get rid of him by banning the IP range given to him by his ISP.

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1 Answer

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@Pre-ads: You mean, like, move to the next coffee shop? Fighting spam is an uphill battle. I would suggest checking the text for patterns like his, and any links for the same type of thing, holding only questionable ones in ‘escrow’ until a human can check it (I would suggest anyone with one or two diamonds next to their names). This guy’s never likely to get such status, unless it were illegally, and then look to see which admin is ok’ing such spams, shut down that account.
Also there are some cool online services that can check for known spammers, by username, email, ip, etc. Would be nice if QATO used such services.

Yeah, I guess public WiFi is a problem :-/ Maybe blocking him by email. After all, unless it's a bot, creating a new email account AND a Unity Answers account every time he wants to spam is more of a pain.

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Presumably he begged someone to write a script to do that for him.

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Am I the only one who is assuming it´s a bot?

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@Joshua Dunno. I assumed he was human, but maybe it is just a bot.

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