While spam-flagging the recent annoyances, I got to thinking (dangerous and annoying, I know), surely others have had to do the same…? Since they get cleaned out of sight, there’s no visible sign. Is there some statistic somewhere about how many per year or month or day or altogether there have been of these? If nothing specific, how about what has been observed? Feels like they’ve become more frequent in the past half of year, but hard to say for sure.
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No stats from me and I am the one who usually wipes them out.
You are correct, in my opinion, that spam has increased in the last six months or so - all from the same POS place.
We really need either a change in forum options or an enhancement to forum options available (don’t know which) but spam rate has not been high enough for me to follow this up (any such change would have to come from higher up the food chain).
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Btw. thanks for the moderation for 2024 - tidy job!
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I disagree at least for the later time. When posts with personal reasons get deleted that just linked to someone else Fediverse to help out other people here on forums, that censorship is not okay.
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I manually trigger my RSS reader to collect the forum posts for me often throughout the day, and I’ve only noted spam a few times in the last few months. (Of course, some spam could have already been deleted before I collected posts in the reader, in which case I might not see them.)
The same spam source started posting in the /e/OS, iodéOS, and Purism forums at about the same time several months ago, sometimes hitting one forum, then moving on to one of the others. It’s my impression that the Purism forums are getting less than the others.
When I see them, I delete flag them, if they haven’t already been zapped.
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On Matrix there is an unofficial Librem 5 room where I got moderator 2023, because of the Purism-Hate-Messages. This stopped, but some month later (summer 24) advertising also began there. But looks like it becomes less when things get taken down within few minutes.
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Very likely. They often don’t survive a minute, let alone hours, before flagging.
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Based on my experience, maybe a spam wave lasting an hour every month, but I do not give much attention to it.
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It also depends on the time of day that the spammer posts.
I suspect that spammers are not motivated enough to find the optimal time of day to post spam such that it survives for the longest time. This forum might also have a bias towards a wide timezone spread i.e. it would be difficult to find a time of day when everyone is asleep, say, compared with a locality-specific forum or a country-specific forum. Privacy and Security are a global problem.
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Surely, global solutions (with challenges), or goals, though 
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But that may be enough to hide the spam until a moderator gets to wipe it out?
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If a spammer’s entire topic, including all posts within it, have been flagged as spam, it is treated as deleted instead of hidden.
I remember at least a couple of times running out of spam flags for the day. But as it happened, I wasn’t the only one around to squash them. Can the regulars allotment be raised? And/or limit new level 0 user’s number of topics and replies within the first hours (or first day)?
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I like the former idea more.
They don’t quite replace one another. In the latter, something like, within the first hour or two after first message only 1 to 2 new threads and maybe 2-3 replies, the first time after new user is created. That would cap the (automated) wave a bit and give time to react. The normal flow of messages is something like 10min to 6 hours between them, so it wouldn’t be a showstopper to that.
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That could be easily circumvented by creating new accounts.
True, and there have already been at least a couple of instances that there were more than one new account simultaniously. But it still limits how effective one is, and force to create that additional user (and limit that). It’s not a silver bullet, just one limit.
But I have no idea how such forum limits are set, so this may be pointless pondering.
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Another active forum community moderator would also work.
Probably, but regardless of their number, anti-spam efforts would still benefit from such limits.
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