I have implemented a couple of changes that were made to the European Tribune site to fend off spammers. The first thing I did was create a new user group called “newbies.” This is now the default user group for anyone who signs up for a new account. New users will not be permitted to post diaries. In order to gain that permission, they must earn our trust and someone with administrative powers will have to upgrade them to a more privileged user group. The second thing I did was make it so that newbies cannot use hyperlinks. This makes it worthless to create new user accounts with linkbacks.
I will have to edit the email that goes out to new users to make sure they understand what they have to do to get diary privileges.
You can help us out by using your rating privileges to up-rate comments by genuine newbies and down-rate comments by spammers.
I hope this will gradually end the onslaught of new accounts and eliminate spam diaries. But I still intend to make other changes, including cleaning up my bloated database. I just think this place needs an overhaul. If you want to continue making suggestions, please use this thread to do it. The diaries are turned back on.
will do my part.
sorry I can’t kick in any $$$ right now. Unemployed, trying to start an elitist business.
Ditto, I’m having some issues with my roommate paying rent but I plan to contribute when I can. I’m glad you’ve got some useful temporary fixes in place, as I really love this site.
Booman,
I don`t mind uprating users at all but how does one know who`s who.
I check UID#`s & some are in the 300,000`s or some seemingly impossible number..
Is there a big “N” beside their username?
A little help over here, please.
if you see a fresh face making comments, make sure to give them a ‘4.’
if you see a fresh face using links to some b.s. site, then troll rate them.
I can see good and bad mojo and maybe build a tool to sort them.
Don’t worry about hunting old spam accounts. I’ll have a plan for dealing with them soon.
A minority of these spammers actually make an effort to write innocent-looking comments, but it’s usually fluff (“Good article, I agree with it all”) and/or includes camouflaged spam links. So I suggest to give 4s to newbies only once they make substantial comments.
Thanks to the ETers for coming over to assist:-)
Is there a way to identify new commenters right on their comments? Different color or some symbol? There seem to be way more lurkers here than commenters/diarists, so it would help if we could pay more attention to the real newbies.
Stupid question: does this giant influx of users help boost what ad pay you? At least that would be a silver lining.
most of their activity is on pages that don’t display ads. But I suppose some small percentage of it helps boost ad sales.
That’s a reasonable solution to try first.
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Glad you found an intermediate solution. Let us know at what ## user account the newbies are registering. Spammers who have already registered previously, will still be able to publish diaries, see present spamdiaries on list. Can you suspend the rights of the last 30,000 users and mail them they have to renew their registration?
There are already 4 spamdiaries up with user ID: 332242 – 329842 – 329461 – 331455.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Since I reopened diaries, we already have five spammers, which I just deleted.
These folks had already created their accounts. I see this is still not solved.
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See my previous comment.
2 more spamdiaries, user IDs: 332226 – 332101. Perhaps drastic action, delete last 30,000 user registrations.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Actually, anyone who signed up on September 2nd, 2009 or later, and who has no positive mojo is probably a good place to start in purging.
I had about 9000 users before the spammers showed up. I probably have 20,000 legit users, many who have left because they hate me. So, about 280,000 accounts need to be smited.
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2 more spamdiaries, user IDs: 331368 – 329099. From what user number are newbies now registering?
I do believe the spamdiaries lately are from users identified above 300,000. For the troll comments with a spam link, all are recently registered. I have been busy giving these comments a “mega troll” rating.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."What’s the law on spamming if any? Seems to me their weak spot is that they’re trying to make money, which has to be sent somewhere. That would be the point of attack, no? If they can’t be hit with legal action, there are always DOS attacks and so forth. The only way to fight back is to cost them money.
This would be best accomplished by concerted action from a wide assortment of blogs. Is there any organization that’s capable of setting up such an assault? There should be. Maybe that’s the long-range answer.
The trouble is that these spammers are spread out, too. These aren’t the mass-mailers you know: they are either one of the tens of thousands of people duped into this (as a form of work-at-home small-business venture) who believe it’s entirely legal (and who maintain the whole Ponzi scheme by wasting their money), or one of also thousands of temp-hired typists on the changing servers of entrepreneurs in South and Southeast Asia who are quite aware of what they are doing. You can only block them.
But still, they have to have a real place to send the money, else the whole effort is for nothing. Make those unusable and the scheme fails. What’s wrong with this logic?
Sounds like a good, low-budget solution, at least for new user requests. Might be somewhat time-consuming for the ones who have already sneaked past the castle gates. I’m happy to help with the troll/spam comment-zapping when needed.
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Here are some 9 comments I troll rated recently. Some have just a single rating, please enjoy. I usually find them when I check the recent comments. With the adjustment on newbies, this problem should be solved.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."That was fun ~ thanks, Oui!