Please report spam - 3 reports moderates the message

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I cleaned up the spam and I banned several accounts that haven't posted yet, but are almost certainly spammers.
 
We updated the blocked IP list and added a few ranges of IP numbers. Pretty much all the spammers from today came from the same block of IP #s (now banned). It's kinda like playing whack-a-mole.
 
PaulStoffregen said:
Robin and I talked about possibly setting up a special "Spam Cop" user group. Membership would be on a volunteer basis, with specific approval from Robin, not based on anything automatic like number of posts.

Anyone in the Spam Cop group would bypass the 3 reports requirement. Your reports would immediately moderate any message. The downside to this power is you can't report any messages for any other reasons, without instantly removing them from public view.

Obviously we'd only add a fairly small number of trusted people that Spam Cop group. Anyone want to volunteer?
Click to expand...

You can count me in if you'd like.
 
The spam attack is still going. Robin just added more IP ranges to the block list, which seems to have slowed them down a bit, but many of the spams seem to be coming from infected PCs all over the world.

Please keep reporting the spam. 3 reports automatically removes the message.

If the attack keeps up or gets worse, we'll look into more drastic measures, like disallowing links in the first few posted messages. But I *really* want to avoid that, since links let people ask better questions.
 
The spam I've seen in the past few days here has all contained in the body just a few words, which were all forming a URL link, and nothing else. I'm pretty sure no legitimate post on this board has ever had that characteristic (at least when it was a new user and starting a new thread). So I guess a script could detect that easily enough. Now of course spammers can easily change that, but it's a step...
 
The three report rule is working pretty well though doing this now would probably be a good choice for a select few and you have history to look at now.

PaulStoffregen said:
Robin and I talked about possibly setting up a special "Spam Cop" user group. Membership would be on a volunteer basis, with specific approval from Robin, not based on anything automatic like number of posts.

Anyone in the Spam Cop group would bypass the 3 reports requirement. Your reports would immediately moderate any message. The downside to this power is you can't report any messages for any other reasons, without instantly removing them from public view.

Obviously we'd only add a fairly small number of trusted people that Spam Cop group. Anyone want to volunteer?
Click to expand...

I re-volunteer . . .
 
I'd be happy to help too... now where is that red helmet of mine?
67811.jpg
(image courtesy of empire online)
 
Has anyone dared to click on one of those sports streaming links?
Maybe if someone has a virtual machine set up they could tell if these are actually links to some nefarious location.
 
Wozzy said:
Has anyone dared to click on one of those sports streaming links?
Maybe if someone has a virtual machine set up they could tell if these are actually links to some nefarious location.
Click to expand...

I just tried this with a Win7 VM on the recent spam message "He could have just distanced".

The link takes you to a Reddit post from a new user with a single post, which has nothing but boilerplate text about free game streaming and a link. That link takes you to a page titled "France vs Romania" and "Get your desirable channels here" with links to the signup on onlinesports.com; each link has an extra parameter past the page. Maybe an affiliate code? Maybe the whole thing is a way to get a piece of revenue sharing from people who actually do sign up?

Interestingly pjrc.com is definitely not the only site being targeted by this campaign; googling "france vs romania rugby watch online" turned up this one (WARNING: The link below is OK, but don't follow any links on that page).

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/watch-romania-vs-france-live-stream-rugby-online--2#/story
 
Likely this is a bot net designed to drive clicks. I wonder if the vbulletin spam killer software allows Boolean parsing along the lines of 'first post' and 'nothing but a link'?
 
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