We need to improve the way of publishing new topics on the Forum ...

6 replies [Last post]
GalaxyDroid
User offline. Last seen 3 years 39 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 2016-11-08
Posts: 1

Why? Annoyed
Because in recent days you can see that something is happening on the Hedgewars Forum that should never happen. Frozen hog!
Yes, I mean this spam (advertisement) on all discussions:
I will go straight to the point: is it possible to add protection of the Forum to something like this for the future? (CAPTCHA before publishing the topic or break between publications)? Geek

P.S. This is just a suggestion ... Big Grin

"When life gives you Old Limburgers, do not smell them ..." - GalaxyDroid

nemo
nemo's picture
User offline. Last seen 22 weeks 3 days ago. Offline
Joined: 2009-01-28
Posts: 1861

You already need a registered account (thus captcha) plus email confirmation to post. So that's already in place.

We used to have a lot more spam before we made the captcha more aggressive. These days it's just a few a month and they are killed as soon as an admin notices. It just so happened I was pretty busy this weekend, and no one else apparently bothered to block and kill the user.

https://www.hedgewars.org/node/5247 There's a history of how bad it got here.

--
Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev

KoBeWi
KoBeWi's picture
User offline. Last seen 3 weeks 6 days ago. Offline
Joined: 2010-12-25
Posts: 565

Such behaviors should be easy to detect, so maybe these spammers could be banned and cleaned automatically?

nemo
nemo's picture
User offline. Last seen 22 weeks 3 days ago. Offline
Joined: 2009-01-28
Posts: 1861

Well, unc0rr wrote https://hg.hedgewars.org/miscellaneous/file/tip/forum_notifier/src/main.rs
To notify dev channel. I guess it could use some rules to unpublish. I'd not want to do deletion without human review though.
Some users are just kinda spammy/enthusiastic sometimes ☺

It hasn't been a huge problem until now though. If we're in an uptick, can get more aggressive...

http://hedgewars.org/node/3377 According to the stats we're at 7 cleanups in last 30 days, which is a little high.

--
Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev

KoBeWi
KoBeWi's picture
User offline. Last seen 3 weeks 6 days ago. Offline
Joined: 2010-12-25
Posts: 565

nemo allegedly wrote:
Some users are just kinda spammy/enthusiastic sometimes ☺
If someone posts the same topic all over the forum, it doesn't matter if it's spambot or regular user, does it? It's obviously unwanted behavior, so that case could be handled automatically. Or any case when someone posts literally the same thing 3 or more times.

nemo
nemo's picture
User offline. Last seen 22 weeks 3 days ago. Offline
Joined: 2009-01-28
Posts: 1861

The last couple of spammers posted different things in each post. I don't think they are dumb enough to be caught that easily...

--
Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev

KoBeWi
KoBeWi's picture
User offline. Last seen 3 weeks 6 days ago. Offline
Joined: 2010-12-25
Posts: 565

Well, the current attack is literally the same post all over the forum, although in different languages. The spammer was kind enough to translate the topic for country-specific sections.

EDIT:
Or maybe a post hiding? On another forum I'm on, suspicious posts are automatically hidden, but mods get to decide whether it's spam and should be removed or false report and the post can be made visible.

With this, we could make the spam detector e.g. auto-hide new users that made few first posts in a short time and safely restore the posts if the user isn't a spammer (which is unlikely). Would at least prevent forum from being flooded every few days.

User login

Copyright © 2004-2024 Hedgewars Project. All rights reserved. [ contact ]