Is it useful to flag every post from a foreign spammer? I usually pick random ~20 posts and flag them. Am I just wasting my time? Do I accomplish the same just by flagging ONE of the posts? Why isn't there flag a user button?
I haven`t been watching the GB West videos lately. Have we gotten any update on how close they are to finding a solution to stop the spam? It kinda seems like it has just gotten worse and worse lately.
It doesn't help a ton but it also doesn't hurt. Once 10 people flag them, it does stop them from posting, but these bots are making hundreds of posts in less than a minute. So by the time that karma ban kicks in the damage will already be done.
At this scale, there's only so much us mods can do. Spam attacks at this level require technical work to completely handle. The engineers are working on it, but clearly there's still work to be done.
There appears to be only a handful of spam users responsible for the posts. Can't they remove the users in a way that deletes all the threads created by them?
I'm impressed. When I logged-in there were 20 pages of spam, a few minutes later they cleaned it all up. Not too bad for early morning 5am(?) PST on a Monday.
I'm impressed. When I logged-in there were 20 pages of spam, a few minutes later they cleaned it all up. Not too bad for early morning 5am(?) PST on a Monday.
I logged in about 4 hours ago and there was 20 pages of spam. It's only now just been cleaned up. I don't know the process of cleaning it up, but early morning US time the forums are pretty much unusable until about this time of day. (I'm in the EU)
@odinsmana - Rorie mentioned on the "Xbox 1" stream that they believed they had a solution in place. That solution either hasn't been rolled out yet or it didn't work.
Flagging is a Karma thing and might prevent them from posting if enough people flag each user, but the damage is already done by that point. I've been reporting them via PM to the mods but I stopped because when it's on this scale, they're keenly aware of it. Not saying don't report it, go with your gut. Just sucks that nobody can really do anything.
It doesn't help a ton but it also doesn't hurt. Once 10 people flag them, it does stop them from posting, but these bots are making hundreds of posts in less than a minute. So by the time that karma ban kicks in the damage will already be done.
At this scale, there's only so much us mods can do. Spam attacks at this level require technical work to completely handle. The engineers are working on it, but clearly there's still work to be done.
10 different people flag them or 10 different posts? Like if i flag one 10 times on 10 posts would it stop them from posting?
@oursin_360: If you flag 10 posts, that would work. However, the issue is way bigger than what individual users can handle. These spammers just create new accounts when one gets shut down so flagging doesn't work as well as it would for ordinary forum issues.
There are more technical solutions on the way, but for now us mods are just bailing water until we get a better boat.
I want to know what is even the point of this spam. What's the end goal of whoever is behind these bots? There aren't even links in the posts from what I've seen, so it's not trying to generate traffic to some other site. The vast majority of the users of this site don't speak the language, so if it's some sort of advertisement, it's not targeting the right groups of people.
There must be some purpose behind this attack, but I can't figure what it is. Is this simply a "some men want to watch the world burn" situation or am I missing something?
@ll_exile_ll: i've heard it has something to do with gaming google results or SEO. having their 'content' appear on trusted sites somehow is parlayed into driving traffic to other places. but how that happens, i haven't a clue.
I want to know what is even the point of this spam. What's the end goal of whoever is behind these bots? There aren't even links in the posts from what I've seen, so it's not trying to generate traffic to some other site. The vast majority of the users of this site don't speak the language, so if it's some sort of advertisement, it's not targeting the right groups of people.
There must be some purpose behind this attack, but I can't figure what it is. Is this simply a "some men want to watch the world burn" situation or am I missing something?
It's probably some kind of SEO. My guess is that they intend to go back and edit those posts with new links at a later date.
@oursin_360: If you flag 10 posts, that would work. However, the issue is way bigger than what individual users can handle. These spammers just create new accounts when one gets shut down so flagging doesn't work as well as it would for ordinary forum issues.
There are more technical solutions on the way, but for now us mods are just bailing water until we get a better boat.
I figure it won't help much but at least that would do something.
@oursin_360: If you flag 10 posts, that would work. However, the issue is way bigger than what individual users can handle. These spammers just create new accounts when one gets shut down so flagging doesn't work as well as it would for ordinary forum issues.
There are more technical solutions on the way, but for now us mods are just bailing water until we get a better boat.
I figure it won't help much but at least that would do something.
When there are pages and pages full of spam, doing nothing is probably more helpful than flagging them. We still have to manually clear all those user flags out of the queue.
Yeah, when it comes to forum threads, especially in the middle of spam waves or with korean letters or other common spam terms right there in the thread title, I don't think flagging them is necessary, we'll get to them eventually.
However whenever you see spam comments on videos, podcasts, reviews/articles (or for that matter user lists and blogs), flagging them or sending us a PM is much appreciated, as that kind of spam can much more easily slip under the radar than forum posts.
This may be a little drastic, but can't GB just ban posting in Hangul (Korean alphabet) for a bit? They'll have to give up eventually, and people only communicate in English on this website anyway?
I think at this point it would be more useful to survey who our legitimate Korean users are and IP ban the rest. The forums are unreadable for me for about 8 hrs every day. How about a script that scans for Korean font and bans any user who uses them? Or a script that recognises when a user posts in a thread more than one year old with text that does not resemble a word in the English language, then creates a topic using non English fonts within the next minutes? Or a user who uses non English fonts and then posts in more than one thread that is over a year old? I can only assume that for some reason writing these checks onto the forum code costs money so it can't be done.
All I know is the last two months these forums are unreadable for me for 80% of the time I have to navigate them. I really hope the engineers can figure this out. I also apologise for offering such layman suggestions as fixes, I am not a software engineer, but it is the only way I can express my frustration.
@splodge: my suggestion would be something like, mod review of first post and a week before being allowed to start a thread. This is how old forums i went to used to do it, and considering this is a pretty niche board based off a specific site I don't think real new members would mind. It would add a little more work for mods though i guess.
Also would a captcha work for first posts or first 10 ?
Yeah, it kind of bums me out to come on here in the early morning hours (PST) to scroll down and all the threads are simply bot spam. I don't know how long it's been happening, but it was just yesterday that I found out that they're bumping older threads too. One of mine was bumped twice. It is cool though because sometimes when I refresh the page the spam threads are all gone.
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