Spammers!

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Karl_in_Chicago

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Good grief, I guess no good deed truly goes unpunished. Admins got the site xfer'd to the new software, preserved the userbase AND existing content AND addressed the performance issues . . . and the spammers have descended like vultures. It's not even GOOD spam, looking at the new thread titles, just what appears to be random machine-generated gobbledygook. Not enough of an expert in the field to even suggest what can/could be done to be more proactive - better human verification for new user signup, 24 hr waiting period before posting privilege, . . . honestly not my area of expertise. Just darned annoying.
Ok, just had to vent.
 
I don't get it either

It's like some high school punks writing meaningless graffiti just to be a PITA

No agenda, just being punks
 
Besides AG and the Mike Phillips forum I am on only 1 other forum and besides the hard core behind the scenes moderators there are some trusted member/moderators who have the power to ban idiots and delete garbage

Just saying
 
Yeah, I was thinking the other day about after Vision bought PBMG, they booted all the non-employee (volunteer) moderators (except for Gearhead on Autopia). Not sure why they did that, whether they thought it was a risk (there was a non-employee administrator/forum rep at the Optimum Forum, who got fired and had a hissy fit and deleted all his posts, making years of threads nonsensical), or whether they felt it was some liability issue (which doesn't explain Gearhead).

But this is kind of when you want to have some moderators to ban, and I guess block future accounts from those IP addresses, if they aren't spoofing them to begin with.
 
GearHead_1 said:
@Setec Astronomy, you gotta know I wouldn't have let this happen.
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Yeah, I know, I didn't realize you ever posted here. But there were some volunteers here, KillrWheels or something, and I think a former AG employee. I remember Killr signing off saying his privileges were going to be revoked.

No one has contacted you about Autopia?
 
I don't really understand how they have been so hands-off. I have to presume since they are putting time/money in with this software change, they intend to be a little more active...does anyone know if they do Facebook or other social media? I don't consume any of that, I just wondered if they were more communicative somewhere about what goes on with the company, that whole thing with the multiple warehouse moves could have been handled with a few posts about what they were doing, instead of with a lot of fed up (ex-?)customers.
 
I think it's all been so quick, days really, since the forum has been online and operational that it's best to give everyone time and just point out that there's a problem. From my perspective I don't think the forum really became reliably online until yesterday and I'm guessing the sudden onslaught is the result of automated probes that look for known loopholes to get their names registered and start their spamming (again, *guesses* on my part). So I'm just posting to make sure the admins know it's an issue (they probably already do), how it's detracting and diluting the content, and hoping they develop and implement a plan.

I'm just ignoring the new threads that are obvious spam but when I see a spam post *within* an existing non-spam thread I DO report that; I'll also say that THOSE posts typically seem to happen en masse from the SAME poster across multiple threads and I mention that and request they ban that poster. This is a fingers in the dike reactive approach, obviously, until a more proactive model of filtering out potential AUTO-spammers might be implemented. Other sites seem to have it down and XenForum is a well known/well used piece of s/w so I imagine there are better practices to follow that address that (and may already be in process but, as I noted, it's really EARLY in this new deployment's lifecycle).
 
Mike Phillips, who uses the same software, says he has his set so he has to approve new accounts, and he filters out 2 to 12 spam accounts a day like that. But of course then someone has to be checking and approving new accounts on a regular basis.
 
I moderate on a forum for VerticalScope, they are a company out of Canada and have over 1500 forums. They have used XenForo for a couple of years now. They have it set up where the software will catch most of the "Bad Guys" but not all. There are two of us that watch that forum. They give us back-end administrative rights to go in and correct the things that the software misses. We manually filter several each day that the software misses. The software is good, but it isn't perfect.

@Setec Astronomy, you may find this interesting, I have moderated on the Autopia site for over 20 years in its various iterations, beginning with Detail City. We used to have a Company ADMIN as a contact with whom we could communicate to get answers or when problems arise. I went through several of them as their jobs changed, or they left the company, but there was always an ADMIN that was responsible for the site. That disappeared about 3 years ago, as I remember. I kept sending Personal Messages and those ADMINS just stopped answering.
 
That's why I figured Jason/Juan wasn't with PBMG anymore, but he apparently still is, in some capacity.

And I think that's what Mike Phillips was saying, that he catches the bad guys that the software doesn't automatically take out.
 
Don't know what he/she/they did but the Admin(s) seemed to have moved on the spam problem right ricky-tick as my normal display of "new posts" is spam free suddenly. Thank you Admin(s) for your quick response!
 
Karl_in_Chicago said:
Don't know what he/she/they did but the Admin(s) seemed to have moved on the spam problem right ricky-tick as my normal display of "new posts" is spam free suddenly. Thank you Admin(s) for your quick response!
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Yeah, someone is kicking some spam butt out there and I appreciate it as well
 
I have found the admin to be very responsive so we should give them time,
 
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