This site been under troll attack for a long time, but it has recently grown out of control. To give you an idea how bad it is, the first new account created in April received a user number of 330663. By early this afternoon, we were up to user 331541. That’s almost 1100 new users in the last two and a half days.
While these accounts have been getting created for a long time, the pace has really picked up. It used to be that they’d just put links in their user profiles which isn’t overly disruptive. But this new batch is posting diaries at an astonishing pace. It got so bad that I closed the diaries because I can’t keep up with deleting them. Yesterday morning I opened the diaries for ninety minutes so a legitimate user could post a diary and at least nine spam diaries went up. Last night I opened it again and forgot to close it. In the morning there were over 30 new spam diaries.
They’re basically killing the site and pretty soon they’ll just fill up my database, so I have to do something. The site design is from 2005. It runs on SCOOP software that is no longer supported. So, I figure if I am going to have to hire a programmer to protect me from the spammers, I might as well just do a total overhaul.
I have no idea how much that will cost. I think I paid about $5000 to the programmer who designed the site for me. It all depends on many hours it takes, and that depends on what I decide to do.
So, if any of you have any good ideas for how to improve the site, let me know in the comments. What web sites do you visit that you really like for the user experience?
The one thing I love about SCOOP is the comments. I hate comments you can’t respond to. I hate comments that aren’t threaded. Facebook comments are cool, but I wouldn’t want to do that exclusively because I actually like anonymous comments. Some of you wouldn’t participate if you had to reveal yourselves.
In any case, give me your opinions. And if can put something in the kitty that would be awesome and totally appreciated. You can contribute through PayPal:
Or snail mail:
Martin Longman
P.O. Box 269
Exton, PA 19341
Also, too, if you want to post a diary, shoot me an email and I’ll open the diary function for you (unless you are a spam troller).
sorry to hear about your troll problems, BooMan.
I don’t have any ideas to suggest, but I hope you don’t quit.
the format at TPV works well: http://www.thepeoplesview.net/
The only issue would be I don’t know if allows for user generated diaries like SCOOP does.
I’ll see if I can scape up a few dollars for ya in a couple days.
I don’t like FaceBook comments. The form is not easy to use, and doesn’t always work right. In one FaceBook group I co-moderate we have had entire threads just disappear and go poof for no apparent reason.
I imagine you have considered WordPress. That does allow for threaded comments, but don’t know about reader-generated diaries. It would be a shame to lose those.
The DKos setup seems state of the art. Any chance of getting some of that code? Didn’t they switch from Scoop some time back? Disqus, which truthout uses, seems pretty good and seems to be getting pretty popular. Not sure if it has a way to check for replies to your own comments though. TPM is apparently making a big change in their comment setup shortly. Might be worth taking a look at the new one. Their comment software has always been really bad, IMO.
I think the essentials are a good setup, meaning ease of use, threading, and a way to check for replies to your comments/diaries. This site rates excellent in that regard.
Please don’t turn to Facebook for comments. Some of us still hate the thing and will be out of here. A lot of places have switched to making you login/register using a Facebook, Twitter, Google, or some other major account. I kinda hate that for privacy reasons, but maybe it’s gotten all these folks to switch because it handles spammers better?
Disqus, which truthout uses, seems pretty good and seems to be getting pretty popular. Not sure if it has a way to check for replies to your own comments though.
You can set it such that you are automatically emailed if someone replies to your comment.
I find that to be a pain. (My fault for still using an email app instead of just going Web all the way, I guess.) I was thinking more of what DKos does very well: the link to see all your comments with stats on any replies.
I second the aversion to Facebook. I don’t have an account and don’t want one, and I lament the many sites which use it for their commenting system, as it shuts me out.
I would recommend WordPress. There a plugin for WP that imports blog content via RSS feeds — feedwordpress. You might ask Pam Spalding about her experience, I think she went from Scoop to WP.
i’m old school and like linear comments – just thread running down the page. dont change the timestamps.
keep the font and color scheme, since bud & coke don’t change their timeless icons brand imagery unless the consultants have taken over. a new frog that bears an uncanny resemblance to Karl Rove would be a nice touch. still – I DO like the old frog.
and lots more of the same. love this site. best to CG & the finman.
feeling guilty now about not contributing, but i must stay off the radar. hope you understand.
Balloon Juice says it’s powered by WordPress, but in my experience that is just as hackable as anything else–maybe even more so, because of how popular and well-known it is.
Unfortunately I say that without offering up a real solution. All the content managers that I like aren’t necessarily the best applications for a discussion forum of thousands of users.
I know Markos is amped to be working with Ruby on Rails, which I have no idea how to deal with–I’m a basic HTML/CSS/PHP designer & developer and am therefore probably not qualified to really answer this or solve it well.
Not to be a wet blanket, but anything can get hacked and/or spammed.
Any idea of why you’re being targeted all of the sudden?
I really like the format here. As others have mentioned, keeping anonymous and threaded comments is a winning combination. It helps keep the comment threads here easy to follow and of high quality.
I think a few minor modifications would enhance the site greatly, and help to deal with your troll issues. Here are a couple easy suggestions (and I don’t know if you’ve actually implemented any part of the first 2, since it’s been some time since I signed up).
That’s all I have off the top of my head. I’ll offer more if I think of them.
I’ll also fire some cash off your way sometime soon. Also, too, mad props for your coverage of the Trayvon Martin case.
These are some excellent suggestions.
WordPress or Drupal are good options for a content management system deployed on an ISP.
Comment spamming in WordPress can be handled by the Akismet plug-in and some of the best practices described in ejmw’s comment.
A Captcha plug-in can deal with most automated spamming unless the attacker is sophisticated.
WordPress comes with roles that can be adjusted so that newbies can only comment for a set period time before they can diary. Subscriber–>Author
WordPress has a large range of templates, or you might hire someone to translate the look-and-feel of the current site to WordPress; there’s a fairly large base of WordPress-savvy programmers.
My experience has been with a WordPress site, but Drupal has similar capabilities.
FWIW: I’ve administered sites with both WP and Drupal. I know it’s very popular now, but I have had a lot of hassles with Drupal. The last site we used Drupal with, in fact, we wound up doing a complete site redesign and switched to WP – and it went a lot better.
I administer two WP sites and never used Drupal. Like you, I knew it was popular. The sites I administer are local and do not have heavy traffic. But they have had attempts to spam them. So far, I can capture the few bogus registrations that get by Captcha. On one of the sites, I require the approval of a first comment in order to post comments; that of course would not work for BooMan because of the volume of his traffic.
Captcha is awful.
It also rejects the right letters sometimes.
Captcha is a real pain in the butt when you have to use it for every comment. Is there a way to limit it to just login or just the first comment of the day, which would be tolerable?
Good ideas. I hope they solve the problem without destroying the best of this site.
Did you ever talk to afew on ET about how we stopped the spam flood? I wasn’t involved, but it wasn’t much tech work and was admin hassle for a while.
Is he still using a yahoo email address?
The nested comments similar to the way SCOOP presents them is critical to the success of the site because that is what creates a community. That way the diary entries serve as discussion starters and the real discussion often takes place in side-threads where people can contribute substantially without posting a diary. There should also be no limits on the length of comments, since some comments are like diaries themselves.
I was just remembering, the late Open Left had a pretty good system, right? Any way to salvage some of that?
If you do redo the site, it would be a great new feature to plug in a “Hot Topics” (or whatever they called it) section That was often the most interesting part of the site, for me, at least. It fills in a gap between formal diaries and the disjointed discussion in open threads. Having a quick way to call attention to transient news makes for a lot more liveliness and probably brings in many more page views/day, Since they scroll away so fast, a person gets to feeling like they might be missing something if they don’t check back more often.
Plus, they somewhat address my pet frustration with all blog formats: the way frontpage/diary entries drop into “out of sight out of mind” land while there’s still potential for followup and thoughtful discussion. Having a Hot Topics for the new news might slow down the diary scrolling without boring the users.
I was also wondering: you’ve been getting a lot of really sleazy Google (I guess) ads — diploma mills, weight loss scams, Newsmax, etc. Any way these things could somehow open a door for spammers? They seem like they’re the same kind of products.
I am not a conspiracy theorist but I am a realist. I think this dramatic rise in new “users” is essentially an attack on this site. It is equivalent to the usual Denial OF Service (DOS) used to take down other Internet sites. They are using the relative ease of registering to be a poster on this site to load it up with spam producers. However, to be honest I have seen spammers showing up on some Yahoo groups where it is relatively easy to post a notice to the group. One thing these sites have in common is the fact that most of them are fairly inactive.
But an increase of over a 1000 members in 2.5 months in my opinion constitutes an attack. We have to take into consideration the fact that Booman Tribune is one of the better known and respected progressive/liberal Blogging websites. IMO the Republicans would be very happy if Booman was forced to shut down, and I for one will do whatever I can to keep Booman open for business.
2.5 days, not months.
But I am fairly certain that this attack has its roots in India. That doesn’t mean that Americans aren’t participating, but I don’t think it’s politically motivated. It’s commerce motivated.
Today evewrything is outsourced, spamming too. search engine optimization spamming (and that’s what you are facing) needs humans to type in registrations, a time-consuming work which American SEO ‘businessmen’ began to outsource to India already in 2009. Note that this whole business has all the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme: the ‘businessmen’ are usually small businessmen who often end up earning nothing, real money is made by those who sell how-to-SEO-spam books, various softwares that supposedly help the job, lists of websites for SEO spamming, and indeed those who run the outsourced “SEO-spamming sweatshops” in India and the Philippines.
Hi Boo and All,
I sent some money this morning. Hang in there.
Threaded discussions were figured out about 30 years ago on USENET. Unfortunately, most of the lessons learned back then seem to have been lost to the mists of time. There should have been an RFC that incorporated the best parts of USENET discussions into web forums so that this stuff wouldn’t have to be reinvented by everyone who wants a discussion on their blog, but that’ll probably never happen. [sigh]
I too like threaded discussions, but they really only work if the software uses unique Message IDs (or something similar) and keeps track of the ones the user has read. I don’t know of any web-based forum software that does. As it stands now, when a user comes into a threaded discussion with, say, 300 comments, or one that has gone on for more than a few hours, it’s hard to quickly know what’s been read before and what hasn’t. It wastes a lot of time. Presumably the software marks everything from the previous page refresh as being read based on the time stamp – even when it might not have been.
I think that’s one of the reasons why Cole and many regulars over at B-J hate threaded comments. Their system is a decent compromise – one only needs to remember a message number to pick back up on the discussion when returning to a topic.
With that said, some sites are better than others.
http://www.BlueVirginia.US has a system similar to here – threaded comments, diaries, etc. It seems to work pretty well, but doesn’t get hundreds of comments per post either. It says it’s built on SoapBlox – http://www.soapblox.net/ It might be worth looking into – no experience with them myself. I don’t know how well it scales.
Thanks for this site – it’s a breath of fresh air.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Welcome to the Frog Pond and thanks for the comment!