FreeOrion

More spam???

This is not really what we meant by contributing to the project....

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Photo-dump.

Musings

Yes, the forum is spammed quite a bit lately. Please don't reply when you see those threads and just wait for them being deleted, because I have to delete your replies as well(= more work).

edit: Just found out how to delete entire threads at once. Still, please don't reply

Maybe this thread can serve to discuss precautions? Someone else replied to a spam thread a while ago and suggested to use different captures, I think.

Precautions: Please don't reply.

Check.

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Photo-dump.

Musings

I am unsure of the registration process to become a poster on the forums, as it has been over a year since I signed up.

I am concerned with the recent posts made by either bots, or by morons who try and gain something for malicious purposes (out of targetting novice users, or generally naiive people who have a habit of clicking on links).

I know it is harder to stop a person from signing up, however in the case of bots, should there be tighter security toward site registration to prevent a percentage of bots?

If there is limited people monitoring the forums to remove offending threads and/or accounts to prevent people from becoming victims of malicious intent, may I please nominate myself to do this for you? I would be most interested in doing this, as I work for an online auctions company with phone customer service/administration of user accounts.

Thanks.

It's mostly Geoff and me taking care of spam. It's quite calm in regards to this lately though.

Most of the spam you might seen on the FreeOrion forums are from bots that automatically register accounts. The majority of these just register and then change their profile to have a link to a website they're trying to promote in search engine rankings.

Relatively few bots actually post, but when they do, they often make 5 or more posts within a short period, which have obvious spam topics or contents, and are often deleted within a few hours.

A few carefully worded posts appear to actually be discussing something well enough to not be immediately deleted or flagged. Maybe once a month I'll see one that might fool a casual viewer, and only a few times a year is there a post that could be misinterpreted by someone who's aware of and thus watching out for spam link posts that try to look legitimate. Usually such a post will still look a bit off, due to odd wording or having unnecessary links to commercial sites, and often will be from an account with few or no previous posts. In these cases, a google search for a characteristic phrase often turns up dozens of hits, indicting it's a bot that's reposting link spam on any forums it can find.

Almost nobody manually registers accounts for spamming purposes on the FreeOrion forums. We're not a big enough site or high enough page rank to warrant the effort.

There's not really any way to have "tighter security toward site registration" than we already have. The captcha is already hard enough that people have commented about it being quite difficult, and the link spam bots will just keep trying repeatedly until they succeed. It probably already stops 90% of registration attempts, but that doesn't really mean much to a bot. For reference, dozens of newly registered but inactive accounts are made every day. The last 10 as of this writing were registered at 6:09 am, 5:24 am, 5:21 am, 4:22 am, 4:19 am, 4:19 am, 3:24 am, 3:24 am, 2:54 am and 1:54 am today.

If you want to flag spam posts, feel free, but we don't need more moderators at the moment, and probably wouldn't make anyone a moderator without a lot more project involvement than 37 posts in one year, although thanks for the offer.

You're welcome Geoff, most of my time looking into this project in a posting perspective is minimal as obviously indicated. With reason this is because I dedicate greater time toward projects when an opportunity to become involved arises (or is offered). My strength is that I'm a jack of all trades, and adapt to anything I do - as an all-rounder.

To paint a picture as to what I have (in my labor intensive life ) put into FreeOrion over the year is community involvement at a basic level. However, I'm more into scouting at the moment until I feel it is necessary to put something decent toward this project. I love what you guys do, and it inspires my imagination, so in return I get people to come here, and to give the content a try. And above all, try to guide talent here. I'm hoping someone I have emailed recently gets involved with this project, he certainly has the ability to create and get proven positive feedback by an audience he mods for. He is a great guy who can take things to the next level, so lets see what happens with that.

Regarding your reply Geoff, everything you have said makes sense. Thanks for taking your time to reply, I am most thankful.

Other than that, you'll see my posts are mainly intended to get peoples ideas flowing. I love to discuss.