Forum spam

By jmt at Tue, Jul 20 2010 5:35am |

Apologies if this has been discussed recently but, well, it's hard to spot legitimate postings at the moment!

There is clearly a big problem with spam postings to the forums at the moment (see every single "Recent comments"...). This is a real shame because there are some very articles and forum discussions on the site. I don't know why this site is being targeted to such an extent, but it seems to be having a much harder time than other comparable sites. I was just wondering whether there were any plans to deal with this. Afraid I don't know enough about this sort of thing to make any suggestions.

Cheers
Jonny

(p.s. sweepstake on how long before the first reply saying "I too think that there is clearly a big problem with spam postings to the forums at the moment (see every single "Recent comments"). I came here looking for *link to dodgy site*"? :)

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Tue, 2010-07-20 17:12 — steja

I too think that there is

I too think that there is clearly a big problem with spam postings to the forums at the moment (see every single "Recent comments").

Sorry, couldn't resist :)

But you are right, this has become really annoying lately. Probably the site administrators have already taken action: I logged out and clicked "register" just now, and there is a captcha to repeat on registration. I don't know since when the captcha is there, but I think it didn't exist when I registered my account (something like two years ago).

A button to report posts as spam would be nice: This way administrators could take action and delete the spam altogether with the corresponding user.

Wed, 2010-07-21 05:02 — drc

One of the problems is that

One of the problems is that the spam actually seems to be generated by people rather than robots and so the captcha system does not prevent as much as we would want.

I do spend some time deleting posts but it is pretty thankless task, any Drupal experts who know of a better way to block it?

Wed, 2010-07-21 08:28 — jmt

I've no idea how easy this

I've no idea how easy this is to implement, but some sites do not allow you to post links until you have built up a bit of a posting history. That might not work on a site like this though, where there isn't a lot of traffic (and so not much opportunity to build up a history, and useful contributions might be lost). Maybe posts with links from posters without a history get held in quarantine until moderated? (but again that's more work for you guys...)