Forum spam statistics?

[irvinewade]

@JR-Fi

And/or limit new level 0 user’s number of topics and replies within the first hours (or first day)?

This is closer to what I alluded to in my first post in this topic.

But both change approaches would be beneficial i.e.

• clamp down on spam being posted, but when that fails
• allow more posts to be flagged as spam

For the moment, I will see about getting the spam flag limit raised. If we don’t stop spammers from posting e.g. 10 spam topics, I don’t see why we would want to set a spam flag limit of less than that number.

In the longer term though, I would like to stop spammers from posting 10 spam topics in the first place!That’s just harder. It is possible that later on if we are doing better with stopping spam being posted in the first place then the spam flag limit could be dropped back down.

@JR-Fi

I have no idea how such forum limits are set

All forum parameters are set by the forum administrator, which is not me. But I can at least advocate for a change.

@FranklyFlawless

Usually I notice spammers targeting the weekends

Spammers must have taken this weekend off, away on holidays.

[amarok]

There may be some useful ideas here: Tips for Preventing Spam - Site Management - Discourse Meta

[ASwyD2]

@irvinewade

Spammers must have taken this weekend off, away on holidays.

I noticed one yesterday

[FranklyFlawless]

These two look promising:

Silencing New Users

Discourse has a num users to silence site setting, which will automatically silence a new user if they receive a certain number of spam flags.

By default this is set to 3, so you may want to consider lowering this if you’re consistently having problems with spam coming from the same user(s).

…

Watched Words

Watched Words are another great feature for helping block or limit posts that contain words, phrases, or URL links that spammers might be repeatedly using.

Considering adding some “Blocked” or “Silence” Words to your site if you’re finding that spammers are frequently using the same types of text in their posts.

For a more advanced use of Watched Words, you could also consider Using Regex with Watched Words.

[irvinewade]

@FranklyFlawless

Watched Words

Speaking from the experience of running my own mail servers, where spam is a vastly larger problem than in this forum, I make two observations about such a function.

1. It requires constant care and feeding. While that isn’t necessarily a fatal objection, it does require someone with the access, motivation and time to manage it.
2. This can be vulnerable to homograph attacks and similar attacks utilising the richness of Unicode (where ‘attack’ here simply means that the watched word action will be bypassed).

The second observation is of a general nature. For all I know Discourse may handle that automatically.

[FranklyFlawless]

Right, we also do not necessarily know if the spammer(s) will adapt to these countermeasures, or if their attacks and resources are only bot-scripted.