Personal computing discussed
Moderators: askfranklin, renee, emkubed, Captain Ned
yogibbear wrote:Selling nike shoes. BUY BUY BUY. These are high quality...
HEY! Stop dissing my first posts...
Well actually I do agree. A lot of spam bots do seem to get past the "are you a real person" tests on this site.
Pagey wrote:
RickyTick wrote:I'm curious how many hits a spam ad gets on a tech savvy site like this. I'd be shocked if it was more than zero.
RickyTick wrote:I'm curious how many hits a spam ad gets on a tech savvy site like this. I'd be shocked if it was more than zero.
nanoflower wrote:Having special questions is a start but it isn't enough when they are using people to drive the spamming.
BuntyMiff wrote:The following should kill this type of spam:
1. Tough Question
BuntyMiff wrote:2. Admin Approval for new accounts
BuntyMiff wrote:3. No free email accounts
BuntyMiff wrote:4. No links
I.S.T. wrote:No links would make it damn difficult to discuss stuff on this forum, or link to helpful articles or deals. In addition, free e-mails would shutout most people, and admin approval would be a pain in the ass. These things work best on smaller forums.
bthylafh wrote:Maybe a restriction that a new user can't post links or non-linked URLs until they've reached n posts, where n is something small like five?
Firestarter wrote:I think some restrictions on posting links would be enough. Not a post-limit, that just promotes spam, but something like hiding all links posted by new users by default from the public eye. Registered users (and the new user himself) would still see the link and be able to click on it, but the webcrawlers and users who aren't logged in won't see them. I'd let a moderator flip the switch to make the links public. This would allow legitimate new gerbils to interact with the rest of the forum, without giving spammers the chance of posting links. A quick glace of a moderator at a new gerbils posts should be enough to see if he's indeed not a spammer.
just brew it! wrote:One potential flaw in this idea: You're assuming the spammers actually read the forum policies before signing up and posting. So the end result may be that we still get the same amount of spam... just with the links hidden from the search engines.
Firestarter wrote:That's me assuming that with measures like these in place, spammers would learn to avoid TR
Firestarter wrote:A pay-wall (even or especially $1) will make a huge amount of your potential new members turn away, just for the effort of having to pay. You might think 'Oh but paypal is so easy' or something along those lines, but you will not find a payment provider that will cover absolutely everyone in your potential userbase.
kvndoom wrote:I wouldn't consider it a full paywall. Anyone could read, but if you want to post, if you truly feel the need to be heard or answered, it should be worth one dollar, one time. Not a subscription, just a buck to be able to post for life. You can sign up, search, read posts all you want, but $1 before your first post.
Firestarter wrote:It's called a paywall for a reason, because it's a wall that most won't jump over even if it's just out of sheer lazyness. You'll end up blocking out the noob gerbil who just wants to ask why his computer is so slow, and fast forward 1 year he's posting on some other site, giving others advice, instead of sticking around at TR. TR isn't like SomethingAwful, where people are willing to shell out $10 just to be like the other 'cool' guys, or something.
BuntyMiff wrote:The following should kill this type of spam:
1. Tough Question
2. Admin Approval for new accounts
3. No free email accounts
4. No links
bryanl wrote:And I think this also explains the "you'd think the spammers would learn" point -- the SEO racket is selling a "get rich quick" scheme to the schmucks who actually go out and do the spamming, but there's a lot of churn among them as they eventually discover they're not getting rich (and not even slowly). And there's no institutional memory about which sites aren't worth hitting, nor any incentive to create one, since the SEO operations can just turn around and sell the same list of websites to the next sucker.re: "Hits aren't really the goal. The real goal is Search Engine Optimization." -- Lawyer blog Volokh Conspiracy had a note on this recently. He contacted the lawyers whose spam was showing up to tell them the spam wasn't really conveying the professional image they might want. In most cases, the lawyers had hired an SEO service and didn't know what that service was doing. That SEO racket is almost as bad as the spam problem (which is almost as bad as the troll problem).
This is a cure that's as bad as the disease -- just infecting the users instead of the site. I haven't and don't want to sign up to use Disqus, and I certainly don't want to have to bow down to Facebook whenever I want to post on some other site. They're already gathering more information on me than I want thanks to my friends' posts; I certainly don't want them tracking, packaging, and selling my activity everywhere I go on the web. If TR started abdicating its log-ins to Facebook, I'd think hard and long about it but I'm pretty sure my decision ultimately would be to stop posting here.Many blogs have gone to using Facebook as a login verification for comments. If you don't have a Facebook account, then you can't participate in the discussion.
It should be possible to be anonymous on the internet (eliminating anonymity is what enables regimes to track down and punish their critics, for example), but there's no requirement that your behavior on any particular site be protected by anonymity. There are better solutions to the problem than handing it over to Facebook, however.That gets into the anonymity issue. Being anonymous in speaking is something new that is being pushed as an inherent right. I don't know about that as it seems more like an avenue to escape responsibility for one's behavior. Without accountability measures to stimulate responsibilities, things can easily get out of hand.
just brew it! wrote:bthylafh wrote:Maybe a restriction that a new user can't post links or non-linked URLs until they've reached n posts, where n is something small like five?
Then the spammers will just make 5 quick junk posts to get over the limit. All this does is make *more* work for the mods, since they'll need to delete the junk posts in addition to the spam.
Geistbar wrote:I actually thought about this before making my suggestion above, and decided it was a bad idea. It really doesn't make things any easier (in fact, it may make the forum coding task harder), and all it will really do is encourage spammers to make five quick garbage posts and then start throwing up link posts. In other words, it very well might increase the number of unwanted posts. And the reality is that it's quite possible to be an active member of the community without ever posting a link. In particular, the first-time users we're worried about not turning away (or creating a barrier for) generally don't need to post links; the people helping them often do, but for the most part they're already site veterans. It's hard to say how much of a workload increase it would be for the mods if every new forum member is required to ping them to get linking approval, and ultimately that's the key determinant of how viable this would be, but I don't think it would be the end of the world if new users had to wait a day or two to get that approval either -- and, like I said, it could be that new users would go on for quite a while before even realizing they're "limited" in this way.You could still construct this carefully so it has a very limited effect on legitimate users. Instead of just making it five posts, make it so you can't post a link until the day after you reach five posts. If they make five spam posts, those will get picked up and their account blocked before they're able to post the actual spam they want to make, due to the time constraint. Making five legitimate posts would probably be too much work on their behalf- they'll just move to an easier target instead.