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.
All forum parameters are set by the forum administrator, which is not me. But I can at least advocate for a change.
Spammers must have taken this weekend off, away on holidays.
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.
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.
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.
You mean in this particular forum or in forums generally?
I haven’t changed my position since writing
We really need either a change in forum options or an enhancement to forum options available (don’t know which)
Maybe there will be better options with Discourse 3.5.0 once Praveen organises that.
Note also that because of the way spam is handled, not all spam ends up being flagged as spam. Some is stopped for other reasons before you even see it in the forum. So any statistics for accepted spam flags would under-count the actual amount of spam.
I would rather that users see less spam, regardless of how much spam there actually is or whether I even know how much spam there is.
Just noticed the influx here this week - had to flag several bunches. Was wondering if anyone else had to flag them too and if there might be a reason why this is happening now (a novel circumvention or some such), or if it was just happenstance.
So, I ran out of flag allotment for the day, again. Everyone else can click to notify the posts for removal too - a bit of community effort.
I wonder if this is a targeted annoyance campaign towards… something? Or has a captcha been broken? With so much, maybe pause allowing new members or something? @irvinewade, @JCS?
Edit: it seems there may be some changes which could be made in Discourse to help mitigate it (plugins). The thread JR-FI linked details them.
Edit2: And for what it’s worth when I first logged in, maybe 20 minutes ago, the page was filled with these posts. Enough that there was what seemed to be significant scrolling to be done to go to actual content.
It would be helpful if when a post [that creates a new thread] gets flagged as spam, the entire thread were reclassified into a “Spam” category that’s hidden from view, as well as further posts from the author.
Then a moderator could review later, and maybe mass delete.
I’ve seen them within the last few weeks in the forums of /e/OS and iodéOS. The posts have been taking the same form as the ones that this current spammer (or team of spammers) uses, and they get posted at about the same time of day. The ones that aren’t in English are in Hindi, I think. (Or gibberish.)
I have adjusted a few settings. Most notably (and hopefully not terribly annoying for legitimate new users), I reduced the topic view requirement for TL0 → TL1 = 5 → 3 and changed the topic creation requirement from TL0 → TL1. This means that a new user must now view 3 topics before being able to create one themselves.
