As an fyi, when the spam threads appear for a couple minutes or almost instantly disappear, it's the anti-spam measure taking care of them. It's how that trolling idiot who kept spamming the forums flaming me a while ago (thinking I was "censoring his opinion") got that mad - he thought I was actually deleting his threads instantly, when he was fighting an automated mechanism manually. Such a smart boy [Kappa]
But every now and then the bots will switch their formatting, or the text, and then the anti-spam measures take a while to kick in. In these situations, I usually mark 10-20 threads "as spam", to help the anti-spam bot pick those up. Taking a quick look at my "recent actions" on the website, I've marked a few hundred threads/profiles as spammers recently, and I've gotten pretty quick at that (can mark 10-20 all at once), but no matter what I can't stay here all day watching it.
That's why every now and then you'll see things go a little out of control. It's a mixture of the spammers adapting to the anti-spam measures and lack of manual control by us (well, me, since most mods aren't really active or can't deal with this, and Bagstone is afk for a few days).
Just thought you might want to know how things work from our perspective. In regards to actual changes to policies, or doubts on website coding and support (like why MMOChamp or Hearthpwn don't suffer these), you'd have to ask Molster - he's the one in charge of those and who actually has knowledge on that. I know almost nothing about Cobalt and the DFans/HPwn/MMOC structure.
I think Bagstone and Molster already said most of what needed to be said about this. I'd just like to chime in and say: thanks for flagging the spam and spammers, you have no idea how much it helps us deal with it (without checking the entire forum). And obviously for your patience while we try to sort this out. I'll definitely keep an eye on these during the next few days!
If possible, though, I'd like to suggest that users only flag a spammer once (and preferably the account/profile, not the threads). Once a profile has been identified as a spambot, marking it should remove all of its threads, so no reason to mark all of those.
We've had like 5-10 reports on the same users (due to multiple threads), and it takes longer to check them one by one than it takes to actually ban those users. And it has to be done to ensure nothing gets left behind.
Just figured it would be something worth letting you guys know. And again, thanks a lot for the help!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
But every now and then the bots will switch their formatting, or the text, and then the anti-spam measures take a while to kick in. In these situations, I usually mark 10-20 threads "as spam", to help the anti-spam bot pick those up. Taking a quick look at my "recent actions" on the website, I've marked a few hundred threads/profiles as spammers recently, and I've gotten pretty quick at that (can mark 10-20 all at once), but no matter what I can't stay here all day watching it.
That's why every now and then you'll see things go a little out of control. It's a mixture of the spammers adapting to the anti-spam measures and lack of manual control by us (well, me, since most mods aren't really active or can't deal with this, and Bagstone is afk for a few days).
Just thought you might want to know how things work from our perspective. In regards to actual changes to policies, or doubts on website coding and support (like why MMOChamp or Hearthpwn don't suffer these), you'd have to ask Molster - he's the one in charge of those and who actually has knowledge on that. I know almost nothing about Cobalt and the DFans/HPwn/MMOC structure.
If possible, though, I'd like to suggest that users only flag a spammer once (and preferably the account/profile, not the threads). Once a profile has been identified as a spambot, marking it should remove all of its threads, so no reason to mark all of those.
We've had like 5-10 reports on the same users (due to multiple threads), and it takes longer to check them one by one than it takes to actually ban those users. And it has to be done to ensure nothing gets left behind.
Just figured it would be something worth letting you guys know. And again, thanks a lot for the help!