Porn for moderators

[George Gilbert]

Gottcha

Seriously though - a question for the other moderators on this board. There seems to be an increasing quantity of porn spam messages being posted to these forums; I'm deleting about 1 a week or so now, wheras even a year ago it I can't remember ever seeing one.

Anyone else noticed this?

[Gambit37]

Yeah, I see the odd one here and there and simply delete them.

It was really bad a while ago, but after patching and putting in the visual confirmation registration thing, it really went down again.

I'm not too concerned at the moment.

[beowuuf]

For no good reason it seems to be the general RTC board gets one guest post every so often with a strange link

[George Gilbert]

For no good reason it seems to be the general RTC board gets one guest post every so often with a strange link

Personally, I've only ever seen them on the RTC General forum too. I had however assumed that all the forums got them, but other mods were deleting them from there before most people saw them - hence the question!

Oh well - makes you wonder why though...

[sucinum]

never seen any (i still check in daily)

[cowsmanaut]

darn I don't get any.. I feel left out.

Anyway, if this is the case and it's some link to a forum thread on some other page maybe? or the search engine maybe that brings up RTC threads.

I know the term dungeon reveals some.. ahem... interesting links. We can go and do the ban on posts without logins. or do they create accounts and post?

The next step would be IP bans.

the cost of becoming popular I guess

[beowuuf]

It'#s a guest posting, but considering the amoun t of genuine guests who post versus one porn post every few weeks, I odn't particularly want to be that exclusive yet just because of a small bunch of idiot spammers who aren't (yet?) flooding us

[beowuuf]

DME general threads occasionally get spam too, like the viagra one currently there - quick cows and sucinum - run! See it now! : )

[ChristopheF]

Yes I delete about 1 spam a week on the DME forums currently. I also have an email notification for all new messages posted on these forums, so it makes one more spam in my mailbox
The viagra one is now gone.
For all the spam I had, they always create a user account before posting, it is not guest posting.
When I will open registrations on the new site, there will also be a visual confirmation (a captcha), and users won't be able to post without logging in. Although there are methods to workaround even these, it still dramatically limits the amount of spam.
However, for the discussion forums here, I agree with beowuuf: the amount of spam we get is not yet enough to ban guest posts.

[beowuuf]

Another post deleted - that'll teach those communists!

Edit: Lol, it's the same one as on the DME - wonder why those two are linked and not the rest...

[beowuuf]

Great, the general news forum got hit with a single spam...grrrr
Russian spam to - thought we got rid of those russian spammy people

[sucinum]

yeah, seen it!!!

[cowsmanaut]

well, I deleted my first.. woot.

Is there a way to prevent them from posting HTML links as a guest?

moo

[Gambit37]

Unfortunately, there isn't. Better security would be to disable guest postings entirely, but as we noted before, the probelm isn't severe enough to warrant that (yet).

[beowuuf]

Grr, in the last week or two I have had to delete six or seven spams from the main new/discussion forum. I've put the IPs in the ban list, firstly because when I left one innocuous one alone to see if it was a genuine poster another spam from the same IP was posted later, but also just to show the IP ranges. A few vaguely similar. Anyway, I don't particularly want to block guest postings, but just wanted to see how bad the problem was getting - who else has cleared up stuff from that forum?

[Gambit37]

Yeah, I deleted four in the last few days.

I never investigated the IP thing properly -- how do you know which IP relates to which person?

[Adamo]

maybe the guests posts (only these, wchich are unsigned by any name or unregistered) should be automaticly rejected from the forum if they use "pussy", "f**k", "sex" etc. words inside their posts, like it does a spam filter on an email box? I think that there`s 0.001 % of chance, that a guest really interested in RPG games would use a word "f**k" in his post. You could warn new guests in "important information for new users" about this.

[beowuuf]

There's an IP thing at the very end, although everyone is 'guest' it twells you the IP of that guest. Since I compares each individually I spotted the first postings were the same IP, and that two subsequent occasions have had similar IPs

Don't know about rejected stuff - as you can see, there is a censor control, and there is a ban control, but haven't seen a rejection control

[Gambit37]

I am beginning to think we need to switch off guest posting entirely. We can't monitor these forums all the time for IP addresses, etc and I am deleting 3 or 4 posts a day at the moment. It'll only get worse as time goes on.

[PaulH]

I agree with Gambit. We are only a small community, and anyone who is serious about DM will take the time to sign up. If the reasons are explained on the page somewhere I am sure genuine guest users will understand.

[PaulH]

The sooner the better too. Loads today.

[Lee]

I agree, it takes nothing to sign up for a username account so if it's going to mean cancelling guest posts to stop the bots... like Paul said, I'm sure everyone will understand and do what is necessary.

[Trantor]

One more vote for this change. Registering is no problem whatsoever. I think that guests should be allowed to read the forum, though.

[Ameena]

Yeah that would be good - make it read-only for guests and then they can decide if they want to sign up (but if they're obsessed with DM like the rest of us taht won't be a problem I think hehe). Otherwise it might feel a bit like a closed-doors kind of "Yeah, we members have all our secrets here and YOU can't see them because you're a GUEST.".
Or something.

[Gambit37]

Guests will always be able to read the forums regardless of what policy we adopt for registrations.

[cowsmanaut]

let us remember that we already have nearly 670 users registered already for our own little "small" community. So it's not such a hardship for people to register I would think.

I mean unless people get a warm cozy feeling every time they see a porn link..

moo

[beowuuf]

f***, that is now the third forum starting to get hit - custom dungeon forum

Really, I liked that anyone with a question could just post, since people are paranoid about giving out any personal info and also are lazy. I didn#t want to lose guest posting at all

Guess we live in a world where selfish and greedy people get to spoil things for others no matter what - another vote for switching to registered users

[PaulH]

Also note that some dodgy fiends have registered too. I draw your attention to 'KoKain', who hails from a very interesting sounding part of the US.

[Adamo]

I think that in total 75% of people visiting this forums never logs in and dont write any posts (as guests I mean). They just lurk in and go away or register and then write posts.
Only some of them write posts as non-registered guests.

[Adamo]

BTW I hate registering in new forums, cause I never remember the passwords.
hmm.. Maybe I should use the same password for everything?