Forum Discussion

jaread83's avatar
jaread83
Champion
8 years ago

Devs - How do you provide tools to mods to tackle spam?

I am curious as to how other Lithium Communities deal with spammers from a development perspective. Do you create custom tools to identify and ban spammers? How about modules that have the 'unmoderated' flag attached to a message until the mod had come along and read the post?

I have had to do a few things on our community to help and I want to bolster it further. The only problem is.. I don't know what else I can do.

From an admin point of view:

  • We have the spam filter switched on and mods check the spam folder each day - this is good but sometimes legit posts get caught up in it.
  • I have the ranking system linked to some low level roles that unlock certain things as they rank up (like private messages)
  • We have known spammer email domains added to the ban list with a wildcard.
  • We have enabled the private messages being sent per second set so a user can't send 100 PMs at once with spam.

And from a development point of view:

  • I have got a js ajax lookup for IP addresses that will inject the country of origin on any users post and profile
  • I have created a panel that displays all users registered in the last 24 hours that also shows the IP and lookup ajax stuff from before. When a user is banned they are labelled in this list so mods know that they have been dealt with

What methods do you adopt to stop the spammers in your community? I only ask because recently we have had a huge influx of spam accounts being created in the last few days. The total amount of spam accounts that were created was 127 and I am trying to come up with ideas for tools to detect such activity and put a stop to it before any damage is done (especially now that our ranking system is currently not working which worked great at the time).

  • Fellsteruk's avatar
    Fellsteruk
    Boss
    8 years ago

    Hi

     

    Spam is a pain for me also however it looks like your doing most of the things you should to prevent spam. Sadly no matter how much we do we'll always face some level of spam but there was one thing I did high made a bit difference was adding reCapcha on the registration page, this almost instantly had a benefit in the fight against spam. 

     

    One other thing you you could do "similar to limiting PM access" is to grant access to bypass spam moderation for trusted ranks, this help cut down on the good stuff being filtered but ultimately the only way to stop this is my constantly removing any "valid" posts so the spam engine learns.

     

    Goodluck 

    • jaread83's avatar
      jaread83
      Champion
      8 years ago

      Hi Fellsteruk, ah yes.. we have an 'established member' role applied when a user has posted a few times (quite a low rank but just enough to identify any odd behaviour) which lets users bypass the spam filter. Our ranking system is currently broken (all users seem to be gaining the top rank automatically for reasons unknown - lithium are looking into it) at the moment though so we are having to hold the fort manually :D Not good but we are somehow managing.

      A captcha on the registration form sounds like a good idea and should provide extra level of protection against automated account creation. I will take a look into that (would probably need Lithium to implement I am guessing?).

      One idea I have had is to create a custom page for moderators to have all sorts of panels and tools available to them. Things like feeds to the report/filter pages, flagged items, pre-moderation blog comments etc etc. Would need a bit of planning but I have a feeling I could come up with something useful for managing the forum from a moderators point of view.

  • ClaudiusH's avatar
    ClaudiusH
    Khoros Alumni (Retired)
    8 years ago

    Although a bit off topic to your question directed at the developer audience I'm curious to learn why you feel the spam filter with the accompanying spam quarantine is not a good enough tool already?

    Too many false positives or too low hit rate for spam messages?

     

    Is your problem more with spam PM or public spam topics/replies/comments?

    • jaread83's avatar
      jaread83
      Champion
      8 years ago

      The spam filter does a good job at identifying obvious spam - posts with dodgy links, somewhat random text with specific keywords among others. Where the spam filter fails though is that it sometimes takes legitimate posts and marks them as spam. When inspecting those posts, there doesn't seem to be anything obvious as to why it was marked as spam. We thought that the spam filter would eventually learn but this doesn't seem to be the case and we may get a few posts every week that we need to release back into the threads.

      One of our main concerns is the Private Message spam. There is currently no way to delete the spammers PMs from a users inbox without logging in to the targetted user and deleting it ourselves. There really needs to be a function to recall and mark all private messages from a user to be removed from the inbox of the targeted users. We have had multiple instances where a user had sent a large amount of messages out to a lot of users and our report board got flooded with spam reports because of this. For normal posts, this isn't a problem as you mark all content by that user as spam and thats it. Private messages remain in the inboxes of the users and we have to just tell people to delete the message manually. I raised this as an idea here.

    • dasyurid's avatar
      dasyurid
      Ace
      7 years ago
      wrote:

      Although a bit off topic to your question directed at the developer audience I'm curious to learn why you feel the spam filter with the accompanying spam quarantine is not a good enough tool already?

      Too many false positives or too low hit rate for spam messages?

       

      Is your problem more with spam PM or public spam topics/replies/comments?

      ClaudiusH came across this thread while looking for solutions to a problem we're having with spammers on our community, and thought I'd respond to your question here.

       

      Couple of things that we're experiencing with the spam quarantine:

       

      1) It has a habit of catching posts that have been submitted, *not* quarantined, and then had minor edits (eg fixing typos, or adding a small extra sentence) made by the author.

       

      2) Most recently, the spammers have a new technique that is somehow preventing the Quarantine from catching their posts. I'll PM you about that separately to avoid advertising the technique too broadly.