Forum Spam

[Mim]

I want to thank you guys for monitoring the spam. It was getting beyond annoying and I appreciate your clearing-up the Forums for us.

[Hermes Serpent]

You're welcome.

[misterharry]

I had to spend an inordinate amount of time this weekend checking the forum, deleting spam and banning the offenders. You just need to check the Moderators Logs to see how much activity there was, and I'm afraid this really isn't sustainable in the long run.

Can the Admin please advise what's being done in the background to deal with this?

Anyone from Cubicle 7 able to let us know please???

[Jon Hodgson]

Hi everyone,
First up apologies for the lack of response here. I'll chase that up - I don't directly deal with the forums anymore, and just swung by to find this unanswered set of questions.

So yes, this is an unprecedented spam attack on our forums, and our spam cops have been working very hard to keep the forums useable.

We have a team of dedicated volunteers in different time zones dedicated to eradicating spam. We've lost a couple of them along the way, so it seems like now would be a good time to recruit some more. Please PM me if you'd like to volunteer.

The post is purely that of spam cop - you don't gain any other moderator powers, and if you should decide to use your spam cop powers to moderate any other content those powers will be removed. Just so we're clear!


Beckett - are you volunteering? (Apologies, I'm on a really tight clock today and I can't quite sift through the jokes fast enough - shout out if you do want to be made a spam cop).

A couple of measures have been taken towards the end of last week - I changed settings so spammers don't get the chance to PM people as easily - we had at least one reported incident of that happening, and we must apologise for letting that happen. Previously we haven't endured such dedicated spammers, and we haven't needed to watch for PMing behaviour. Now it seems we do.

We also updated the registration question - this doesn't keep spammers out for long, but we suspect there's a list somewhere which has the correct details to register, and that list is shared around. Keeping that updated might cause sufficient pause to put off the level of spam we're seeing lately. Worth a try at least.

We'll also consider how we handle forum sign ups. We have to be careful as a small publisher to balance the needs of the forums with our capability to administer them. No one wants us taking time off making games to directly administer forum sign ups.

We'll keep on battling.

[Jon Hodgson]

Ok, having looked over the logs, I've taken a radical spam prevention measure. New registrations are disabled for now.

We'll throw up an announcement to explain this.

Misterharry should take a deep bow, and we should all thank him for the mountain of anti-spam work he's carried out lately. It's astonishing. Thank you, Misterharry. Take a break while registrations are temporarily closed. You've earned it!

[uhu79]

whoopiie... we are elite finally

but wait, we've been pretty peculiar all along... hmm...

[beckett]

Hi everyone,
First up apologies for the lack of response here. I'll chase that up - I don't directly deal with the forums anymore, and just swung by to find this unanswered set of questions.

So yes, this is an unprecedented spam attack on our forums, and our spam cops have been working very hard to keep the forums useable.

We have a team of dedicated volunteers in different time zones dedicated to eradicating spam. We've lost a couple of them along the way, so it seems like now would be a good time to recruit some more. Please PM me if you'd like to volunteer.

The post is purely that of spam cop - you don't gain any other moderator powers, and if you should decide to use your spam cop powers to moderate any other content those powers will be removed. Just so we're clear!


Beckett - are you volunteering? (Apologies, I'm on a really tight clock today and I can't quite sift through the jokes fast enough - shout out if you do want to be made a spam cop).

A couple of measures have been taken towards the end of last week - I changed settings so spammers don't get the chance to PM people as easily - we had at least one reported incident of that happening, and we must apologise for letting that happen. Previously we haven't endured such dedicated spammers, and we haven't needed to watch for PMing behaviour. Now it seems we do.

We also updated the registration question - this doesn't keep spammers out for long, but we suspect there's a list somewhere which has the correct details to register, and that list is shared around. Keeping that updated might cause sufficient pause to put off the level of spam we're seeing lately. Worth a try at least.

We'll also consider how we handle forum sign ups. We have to be careful as a small publisher to balance the needs of the forums with our capability to administer them. No one wants us taking time off making games to directly administer forum sign ups.

We'll keep on battling.

Yes. I am volunteering. I will PM you, Jon. Thanks!

[misterharry]

Ok, having looked over the logs, I've taken a radical spam prevention measure. New registrations are disabled for now.

We'll throw up an announcement to explain this.

Misterharry should take a deep bow, and we should all thank him for the mountain of anti-spam work he's carried out lately. It's astonishing. Thank you, Misterharry. Take a break while registrations are temporarily closed. You've earned it!

Thanks, Jon. Hermes Serpent has also been taking his share of the strain, so a big thanks to him too.

I suspect there may still be the occasional spam posts as there have been hundreds of dubious new registrations over the past few weeks, and only a sub-set of those has so far stuck their heads above the parapet and actually spammed the forum. But it's great to hear that something's happening behind the scenes to address the problem.

[Deadmanwalking]

There's new spam. I'm...sort of bemused by this given the situation.

The spammer appears to have registered yesterday and only begun posting today. Which makes sense, I guess, but wh did they wait?

[misterharry]

There's new spam. I'm...sort of bemused by this given the situation.

The spammer appears to have registered yesterday and only begun posting today. Which makes sense, I guess, but wh did they wait?

I dealt with another one this morning who had registered a couple of weeks ago and waited today until they posted their first spam. When we last had a similar situation a couple of years ago, they were coming out of the woodwork for weeks after the door had been closed to them.