Admin: Spam Concerns

[JoeS]

Thank you to those of you who flag spam posts (like the 23 we had last night before I blocked the miscreant); I receive an email notification but since I don't have either my computer or tablet or cellphone attached to my bellybutton (yet) I might not retrieve the email for a few hours (but another moderator might).

Happily, the spam attacks are still manageable, so please bear with us.

Wishing everyone a safe New Year.

 

[JoeS]

Well, we just had an 'interesting' experience on this forum: we just had a fairly massive attack by what I have termed "Disruptors" (as distinguished from spammers) - mostly nonsense posts, many with emojis, and some with vapid comments. It took a while to clean up since they were scattered seemingly randomly across many topics by more than a half-dozen posters in what looked like a coordinated effort .

Pertinent data about the perpetrators has been identified and recorded as they were banned from future posting.

Pity, as this type of activity interrupts the wonderful and pertinent flow of information by the very astute members of this forum. Again, thank you to those of you who flagged this.

 

[JoeS]

A relatively-common ruse by spammers it to first join our forum and then post one or more innocuous and usually inane comments on random threads, before subsequently escalating and hitting us with posts with a link to whatever product they're hawking (shilling?), often with many posts in quick succession. I've even seen them copy/paste others' comments and post them completely out of context.

There has been a resurgence of such events recently, which is disruptive and wasteful of everyone's time.

A notice and caution for the future: if a new 'member' does not introduce themselves as having some interest or association with the i-MiEV (or triplet) and puts in a vapid post that is not on-topic, I'm afraid that I'll be deleting that post but will stop short of banning them in case they are really legit.

Sorry for belaboring this, as I love this forum and have great respect for our worldwide community of such astute and knowledgeable members so freely sharing and helping others.

</soapbox>

 

[coulomb]

if a new 'member' does not introduce themselves as having some interest or association with the i-MiEV (or triplet) and puts in a vapid post that is not on-topic, I'm afraid that I'll be deleting that post but will stop short of banning them in case they are really legit.

Yes, you need that. On one of the forums that I moderate, we have a canned response for disallowing the first post, something on the order of "We require a more substantial first post for spam control". I'm guessing it adds one more item to the list of things to do when updating the forum software, however.

 

[JoeS]

Recently we've had a resurgence in spam posts; in addition, in the last day we had a couple of posts from one new username that had fairly sophisticated entries which were seemingly on-topic but contributed absolutely nothing. One of our members reporting it suggested an AI bot. I tend to agree, and will try to stay vigilant. Thank you all for reporting these, and we moderators will continue playing whack-a-mole.