Why is the spam so bad lately?

Hey duders,

If you use the forums as much as I do, you've surely noticed the sheer amount of spam that gets about lately on here. When I get up in the morning, the ENTIRE front page of the forum is blasted by Keto Gummy spam, and has been every single day for the last month

But it's not just the threads, it's the posts too. As I write this, the last twelve bumped threads are all from the same spammer posting some moronic work from home thing

I don't remember the spam being this bad, but lately it's been something else

What's the solution?

Been wondering the same thing myself. Its seems like its getting worse everyday. Perhaps the new overlords are not running as tight a ship? I do not possess the knowledge to even suggest any type of fix. I guess all we can do is spread awareness.

We know Rorie spends time on the forums so he must notice it and be attempting to find a solution.

I'm not against occasionally requiring a CAPTCHA to post on the forums, to be honest. Especially for new accounts and excessively active ones. The most recent account going wild was started today and has already made 12 posts.

It's wild, but the thing I am more fascinated by are the bot posters who make posts that feel *sort of* like real posts like the one in this thread.

Mods are real slow to respond to flagged posts too. Sometimes the spam is up for hours. If mods don’t have the time to do this voluntary work, get more mods or more tools to mitigate spam.

It really does make the forum unreadable for most of the day, for me anyway in Ireland.

Locking threads that have been inactive for, say, a year or more would probably help some, too. Don't know how hard that would be to do, but a lot of the spam is coming from threads where the last comment was well over a year ago.

@sethmode: The sort of real posts are often just grabbing a post from earlier in the thread, and running it through a thesaurus program that just replaces nouns/adjectives/verbs with a synonym that makes little sense.

If you see an original thread with a “sort of real” post, they’re likely stealing a blog post from some other site and running it through the same program.

@bisonhero: Yeah, that was essentially what I figured out. It's disconcerting though, especially at that first realization. Encountering that kind of shit more and more is really...irritating, to put it mildly.

Awhile ago I did some looking into the GB userbase and it turns out that a tremendous amount of accounts are spam bots. And I've had some time to think about what could be done to combat the spam.

Honestly I haven't come up with much. I do think that the first time a user performs and action: setting their profile, creating a post, commenting on a thread, etc. they should be presented a new captcha. Ditto for necroing old threads; let it happen but force a captcha. Captchas can be solved with an API call but interestingly at the other end of that API is a human solving the puzzle. And those humans need to get paid. So more captchas won't necessarily prevent spam but it would drive up the cost for the spammers.

Yeah, I've been seeing it as well. It's getting weird like someone hacked and took over the website and the GB internet people can't seem to get rid of the person. Sure, they delete the threads, but by morning the next day, they come back. It also does not look good for running a premium service asking people to subscribe. What if this person or persons is trying to get account information from people who upgraded. I don't know what money GB needs to spend to get some experts to handle it, even if it means the website goes down for maintenance while a whole new code is developed, but they need to do something as it is getting worse.

How about if your first [x] posts contain a hyperlink they require mod approval? Kind of like how Steam has an automated system for checking posts with links.

Mods are shitposting in bombcast chat but won’t remove a 2 hour old spam post in the forum. Sigh.

I usually delete them all around 6am ET when I wake up. Not much else I can do personally.

@permanentsigh: At the end of the day, 2 hours doesn’t matter as long is it gets deleted eventually. The mods can’t be everywhere all the time.

The bummer is some spam posts on old videos, threads, etc., live forever because no one notices them. Then they’re just out there, manipulating SEO forever, directing suckers to some shitty scam website for “escorts” or dick pills or fake passports or whatever.

@bisonhero external links automatically get a "rel=nofollow" applied to them, so they don't even help achieve some SEO spammer's goals.

Crowdsourcing could help. If 5 or so "verified" users flag a post it should be hidden immediately, then deleted or restored by mods later. "verified" could mean they've been registered for two months and made 50 posts without any deletions, say.

I doubt theyd do that

@sombre: There already is a karma system that works similar to that, but it's not all that useful against spambots. All that system does is prevent the user from creating more posts, but since the bots tend to only use an account once and then move onto the next, that system rarely does anything to actually slow them down.

We have an automated system that should be automatically nuking these posts but clearly it's not working right. I'll pester the engineers again about it on Monday!

Spam is definitely a nuisance on forums and it can be frustrating to see so much of it. One solution would be for the forum moderators to be more active in removing spam posts and banning spammers. Another solution could be to implement stronger anti-spam measures, such as requiring new users to verify their email address or using captchas to deter bots. Ultimately, it's important for the forum community to work together to report and remove spam in order to keep the forum a valuable and enjoyable place for everyone.