Porn removal?

[Lunever]

I just deleted a couple of porn advertising posts in the forums moderated by me. Some were posted by some new "user". Can I please have some means to remove such "users" along with their posts from the forum?
Some others have been posted by a non-registered Guest. I thought that posting something in one of our game-related forums required prior subscription?

[beowuuf]

Only an admin can do that, so you would need to ask cows for that

The guests are because I am on the case killign the user, the cleaning up his posts that are turned into guest ones

On the phone hence why not fast doing it

[Ameena]

I've deleted a fair few posts over the past couple of weeks. I did notice the appearance of a few more earlier, but they weren't in areas I moderate so I couldn't nuke 'em. I suppose we must be in Spam Season or something .

[beowuuf]

Yeha, there's somehting odd about the flux, it was settled and not too bad and it's gone crazy again

Thanks for all the twattage you two (I'm off the phone now and can drivel)

I wish the forums let you have 'hidden mods' so that adding everyone to mod the forum woulnd't create a confusing string of like ten names

I suppose since it's really spammer hitting, and no mod usually has to use their powers for simple thread splitting, then there's no point in tryign to keep the mod names as 'relevant'

In the case of users - before dleeting a post, can you open a 'IP address' window for them and post their name and IP addresses, that way quickly can be deleted plus we can ban that IP address, hopefully block a few of them that way (everything else is actually pretty inneffective I have to say )

[beowuuf]

Ok peoples, I've given you both and trantor and sophia full run of the forums to go spammer hunting

The 'general archive' is a good place to keep the front page of any board clear of dead posts until they would naturally die a death, but it;'s important to edit those moved posts with where they came from (I tended to move DM2, CSBwin and dungeon topics, and didn't edit the headings of dungeon topics)

The for pruningforum is a good one so as not to delete a thread but flag it up as being bad and quarantining it

[Trantor]

Thanks for the privilege Beo. In the past few weeks, I wished a couple of times to have the power to kill those spammers.

[Lunever]

Ok, spamers here we come! But having no means to make mods hidden is indeed a bit annoying, for now no one will know who of us actually cares primarily for what subforum. Anyway, as long as each of us keeps modding his favourite parts of the forum and occassionally does so in other parts of the forum, this should work; after all, we are not that many regular regulars here.

[Ameena]

Oh cool, I can nuke posts wherever they are now! Woot .

[Lunever]

Wohoo, and I can ban Trant from the forum and delete all his posts

[beowuuf]

I'm afraid you can't ban trant...merely delete all his posts

Yes, as you say it makes you four essentially look liek you care and know about it all- not much can be done about that, maybe if the forum software shifts at any point then there might be a feature like this

[Lunever]

Well, there are only so much specific requests to a mod, and in those few instances when we don't have the proper information at hand we can still pass on questions to the proper mod.

[Ameena]

Someone on the other forum I frequent just registered and posted about a thing to stop spambots getting through. I dunno if it'd be any use here but I'll copy/paste the posts he/she made so you Admin-types can take a look. Dunno if it'd be of any interest to you but...well, if it's anti-spam and it does work, then maybe less time spent nuking crappy posts/"users" by the Mods Admins .


Here is what the person posted originally...

"I see this site is being troubled by spam. There has been a huge increase in spamming on message boards in the last two months. Apparantly they have now got themselves their own servers. You can ban certain mail addresses and domaine names, as I have, but they keep coming.

For those of us running boards it has become a real pain and very time consuming going through new members and deleting the spam bots. Happily the answer, at least for me, has come in the form of add on software you can download. There are various versions depending on your forum platform.

It adds another question to your registration process; one that bots can't get through. Since I've added this feature I have had no spam users. "


Someone else posted in response saying that if it's the thing that puts up a bunch of letters and numbers for you to type when you register, it wasn't needed as the forum already had some kind of safeguard. The person replied with...

"No the bots can read those optical recognition systems now and get through. The new question is one you set yourself.

For instance my website is based around the band R.E.M. so I have a question about that. You need to make it a question that only has three or four simple answers but one that you need knowledge to work out; for instance "What is the sum of four and two?""

And then another post with links...

"There you go:


http://bbantispam.com/tc/


Try and register on http://www.oddfellowslocal.com/ to see it working."



As I say, I got no idea if it'd be of any use, but thought I may as well mention it anyway. Just in case it is .

[beowuuf]

Yeah, banning domains and e-mails I do but its useless, hence why I go after any IP addresses of bots that manage to post

I will leave it to gambit to say if this is soemthign worthwhil,e be nice if it is

The trouble is the letters thing was foolproof until it wasn't And anything that a bot can't work out you can get a human to do apparently by iofferign free membership or whatever for a logger to answer one of these questions!

Theres' too many pervs and not enough forums

[Gambit37]

I've been keeping on top of the new methods and all the stuff Ameena mentions are possibilities I keep in mind. The new visual confirmation in phpBB3 is better but some have already been broken apparently!

To be honest, until we upgrade, there's not a lot of point discussing it. I'm not going to bother upgrading more than once, so it would be better to switch to new software and see how we fare. While spammers are annoying, to be honest I don't think we get enough to warrant all this time and effort.

[beowuuf]

That's cause everyone twats them all

Actually, might be interesting to compare - I usually have to delete a spammer every day or two days, with heavy days/weekends increasing that to 5 - 8 users in a day.

I haven't had to delete a guest post in ages, but usually have to delete the spams of a 4 - 6 page spammer once every week or two

[cowsmanaut]

yes, I've had anpit 4-8 a week most of the time myself just of new users who register and are obviously up to no good

[Parallax]

Here's a stupid idea, I don't even know if it can be done in practice, but here goes: New accounts cannot post and can only send PMs. To have the account unlocked a new user must send a PM to an admin asking for the authorization. Once the admin validates the account, then the user can post as normal. I'm not sure that we get so many new users that it would be a nuisance for the admnis, but I'm not an admin, so feel free to correct me on that.

[beowuuf]

Yes, there's a problem with that - it's annoying to everyone!

There is a facility to only have accounts be activated by admin alreayd, admins get a mail.

Unfortunately us admins have real lives, so the one time GG tried it all the admins got spammed with mails they didn't see for a little bit (it co-incided with me b eing on holiday, plus i dont' check my given out mails that regularly). The second problem was this does not stop spam users registering, jsut posting, so us admins all got a huge amount of e-mail, only now we have to wade through it all and spot the real users fro mthe spammers.

Basically, some users only register to ask a question - I think it is alreayd nasy enough leap of trust to have to register to ask a question, without then having to wait for up to a few days for the accoutn to be active. I think people might give up before then, I don't know.

The pm system might work slightly better...only you can only pm when you hold an account

[Ameena]

Maybe "real" new users could first make a post in the Guest forum or something, one which can somehow "prove" that they're not a stupid arsey spammy wazzok...say something DM-related or whatever. I dunno. And if they only wanted to ask one question, would they need to bother making a whole account anyway?

[beowuuf]

Well, it's nice to register an account to post a question in the right forum, saves us mods having to move all the clutter of posts to the correct forum, and we could only do that once the thread was dead - so everyone would have to check out that forum to check and answer the question, and we would ahve the clutter of new posts that are actually rehashes of old posts too!

May people only rgister to keep track ofthe forum I think, to see new posts have arrived. We already have a thread to introduce people in, and many don't do it. It would probably be the same with the guest posting to activate.

I hate having to have people register an account anyway, people should be able to just post to the forum. Let's not make them jump through any more hoops than they have to jsut now, and give ourselves more work and clutter up our nice forum. Let's jsut find a way to get the real problem, those spamming ****s, out of our lives.

I vote shotgun...umm, on the car journey to the store to pick up the right software...yes... O.O

[linflas]

wow ! big spam today from 'talkingmushrooms' : i deleted the posts i could delete...

EDIT : ...and 3 new registered members to remove !

[Gambit37]

I'm on it...

EDIT: Bloody hell -- Talkingmushrooms had 16 posts from multiple IP addresses -- which makes me think they are being faked, therefore banning them won't stop this c*nt from doing it again.

[beowuuf]

Dammit!

See, I ok'd the little **** because I'm being nice to potential new users No bad e-mail, no links, no reason to think it couldn't be a new user

This si the third large scale flooder, AND some have started putting porn in the image tags too

And yes, the multiple IP addresses and even multiple names of the same spammer I've seen before too

As I've said before, we aren't actually allowed to have a forum anymore for ourselves, all we are doing is having a nice site for these fucktards to post their links that no one gives a fuck about...it's our bandwidth, our time and effort to remove them... I hope thye all develope leprocy of the lung and die

[Gambit37]

Yes, let's switch the forums off, things would be a lot simpler...

[Sabreman]

It is somewhat disheartening to come to the forum, see all the little crimson icons and thing 'yay! Lots of new stuff to read!' then scan down the last post list and see they're all the same person

[beowuuf]

It's even more disheartening for the poor mods and admins to realisise they have to deal with it

Still, nice one Lunever and Gambit for your combined spammer twattage, and of course Ameena did the same not too long ago to a 10-count poster too

[Parallax]

Don't get discouraged, Beo. I hope it will make you feel better to read that your -and every other mod and admin of this forum-'s efforts are very much appreciated.

Pulling out the weeds is tedious, but sadly it's part of tending for a garden. I hope you guys never decide that it's not worth the effort.

[ian_scho]

Seconded!

[Sophia]

It is somewhat disheartening to come to the forum, see all the little crimson icons and thing 'yay! Lots of new stuff to read!' then scan down the last post list and see they're all the same person

That happens sometimes even when it's not a spammer, though.
How do you think beo got to 10000 posts?

(Unless you consider beo a spammer... hmm. He is always posting those ads for prescription vi potions and mophus porn...)

[Trantor]

It is somewhat disheartening to come to the forum, see all the little crimson icons and thing 'yay! Lots of new stuff to read!' then scan down the last post list and see they're all the same person

That happens sometimes even when it's not a spammer, though.
How do you think beo got to 10000 posts?

(Unless you consider beo a spammer... hmm. He is always posting those ads for prescription vi potions and mophus porn...)

And don't forget the handy guide "How to ban a user named Trantor in a thousand ways and having fun with it".