12 pages and counting of stuff in Active Content. 287 entries in the last 24 hours. Aw snap now it's 289. Is it just me, or is GD attracting more spammers lately?




Now it's 297 entries... This page sufficiently expresses how I feel, particularly the picture.

Is there a way we can slow down the spammers in the future until a mod is able to ban them? Like maybe, if someone gets too many --ratings in the first week of registering, their starting a new thread privilege gets put on hold until a mod reviews their account?

Now it's 307 entries...

[edit]

Ooooh, it looks like GDnet is making a comeback! Now there's only 258 entries in the last 24 hours! Now 243! This is like watching an intense battle, seeing the new spam come in at the top of the Active Content list, and refreshing to see what the score is!

Sidenote: Yeah, I know not all 243 entries are spam, but most are, so I'm just using the total number of active content as the score.

216... my thread is now near the top! Why the freak is this entertaining to me?

We should require the first post of a new user be reviewed by a moderator (or anybody with 100+ reputation) for approval, and prevent the user from performing any other actions until the post is reviewed. Something like: "We're sorry, but your demeanor is currently being judged from the content of your first post. Please wait patiently. "

Also: Maybe a content-similarity filter that silently fails submissions that are >= 90% similar to a recent post, say in the past half hour or last five or ten posts. (This can prevent accidental double-posting!)

We should require the first post of a new user be reviewed by a moderator (or anybody with 100+ reputation) for approval

I'm not sure, it could be tricky, a new user may make a first post that isn't all that great (like "hi im timmy and i want 2 maek hockey mmorpg"), but still not spam, and then a moderator or 100+ user may just dismiss the post, and with that the new user, because they personally don't like the post...

[quote name='fastcall22' timestamp='1319393047' post='4876002']
We should require the first post of a new user be reviewed by a moderator (or anybody with 100+ reputation) for approval

I'm not sure, it could be tricky, a new user may make a first post that isn't all that great (like "hi im timmy and i want 2 maek hockey mmorpg"), but still not spam, and then a moderator or 100+ user may just dismiss the post, and with that the new user, because they personally don't like the post...
[/quote]

Also then you're just spamming everyone with over 100+ rating :-p

If at any point in time a bunch of people join for some reason you'll have to deal with approving everyone rather than just deleting the spam bots. If the number of real people joining > the number of spam bots, you will save time doing it the way they do now.

Staff and mods are discussing several options for limiting something like this happening again in the future.

One of the more interesting side effects of all this spam is that it shot our site up to the #1 Google search result when people went looking for watching live streaming football games over the internet. Somehow they found their way from these spam posts on our site to GDNet+ and we actually got 14 people sign up for our membership service to watch streaming football. One lady called up Dave Astle (as in, got his phone number somehow) and asked him why she couldn't watch the Steeler's game!!

So yea... we don't want to see this again

Kudos to the mods who were around to clean this all up!!

I'm not sure, it could be tricky, a new user may make a first post that isn't all that great (like "hi im timmy and i want 2 maek hockey mmorpg"), but still not spam, and then a moderator or 100+ user may just dismiss the post, and with that the new user, because they personally don't like the post...

The general idea was to have people with 100+ reputation filter out spam stuffs on their free time. Imagine "active topics" with checkboxes, only instead of the active topics, it's a list of posts/threads waiting to be admitted. Maybe some criteria to color the threads a different color indicating probability of spam. The goal is to weed out threads titled "WATCH FREE ONLINE SPORTS HERE CLICK BAD ENGLISH NAO OMG ASIA".

Though it's probably more work than its worth, since this doesn't happen often.

Staff and mods are discussing several options for limiting something like this happening again in the future.

Can't wait to see what you guys come up with.

Somehow they found their way from these spam posts on our site to GDNet+ and we actually got 14 people sign up for our membership service to watch streaming football.[/quote]
I have lost all hope for humanity. Also, WTF.

EDIT:
Coerce Dave into posting the phone conversation; I'd bet that'd be quite an entertaining read!

One of the more interesting side effects of all this spam is that it shot our site up to the #1 Google search result when people went looking for watching live streaming football games over the internet. Somehow they found their way from these spam posts on our site to GDNet+ and we actually got 14 people sign up for our membership service to watch streaming football. One lady called up Dave Astle (as in, got his phone number somehow) and asked him why she couldn't watch the Steeler's game!!

So yea... we don't want to see this again

Unless the phone conversations are recorded and posted for the lulz ofcourse!

[quote name='Gaiiden' timestamp='1319501624' post='4876537']
Staff and mods are discussing several options for limiting something like this happening again in the future.

Can't wait to see what you guys come up with.
[/quote]
Hopefully you won't. We're trying to solve this on the back-end.

We've rolled out the first of our backend changes to stop spammers. Our community members have flagged these guys so quick (fastcall22!!) that our moderators are able to clamp down on them quick. Yesterday at one point we had over 16,000 people visiting the site and saw a spike in site traffic of almost 100,000 page views. Jeez.

One of the more interesting side effects of all this spam is that it shot our site up to the #1 Google search result when people went looking for watching live streaming football games over the internet. Somehow they found their way from these spam posts on our site to GDNet+ and we actually got 14 people sign up for our membership service to watch streaming football. One lady called up Dave Astle (as in, got his phone number somehow) and asked him why she couldn't watch the Steeler's game!!

Wait... seriously?