Spam reduction via akismet

calguy1000 · **Posted:** Sat Nov 22, 2008 4:24 pm

As many of you know, we have been being swarmed by spammers lately. I guess it's a sign of our popularity.
Anyways, we've taken a few steps to try to solve this problem.

1. We no longer accept registrations from hosts with a mail.ru email address.... this is because we got tonnes of people registering from
that domain, just to post spam.

2. We have installed Akismet support in the forum. This may mean that posting is a bit slower, but should help solve our spam problems.

Happy CMSMSing.

Pierre M. · **Posted:** Sat Nov 22, 2008 6:59 pm

Popularity, yes, there are twice+ new members in the forum this month so far. Well, spammers and new members.

I confirm the "slow posting" feeling. But well done, it works. thx.

Pierre

JeremyBASS · **Posted:** Sun Nov 23, 2008 4:25 am

any way to set this to expaire after say 50 posts? it's caused my to double post now three times... a pain to go delet one after...

thanks jeremyBass

Dee · **Posted:** Sun Nov 23, 2008 2:12 pm

JeremyBASS wrote:

any way to set this to expaire after say 50 posts? it's caused my to double post now three times... a pain to go delet one after...

Indeed... is there a way to skip this for users with a certain numbers of posts or Karma level?
I just had a forum answer which took quite some time to write not turning up on the forum (problably because I included a few links)

Regards,
D

Pierre M. · **Posted:** Sun Nov 23, 2008 4:26 pm

Come on

my browser is multitab. I can go on on another tab while my post is on the way.

Dee wrote:

is there a way to skip this for users with a certain numbers of posts or Karma level?

I'm not sure it is a good idea. Think as a spammer :
-create some accounts.
-the bots post some padding posts to get "number of posts".
-the bots give karma to some of the account to get "karma level" (or trash yours)
-now at least one of the account of the spambot isn't filtered by your criteria.

Pierre M.

Dee · **Posted:** Sun Nov 23, 2008 6:07 pm

Pierre M. wrote:

Come on ;) my browser is multitab. I can go on on another tab while my post is on the way.

I'm not complaining about the long wait. My post got lost...

me -> pissed about lost time and effort
the one who asked the question -> didn't get an answer

Regards,
D

JeremyBASS · **Posted:** Sun Nov 23, 2008 6:43 pm

Code:

-the bots post some padding posts to get "number of posts".

if Akismet is truned on for your first 50 posts... then... a bot wouldn't make it to 50 ... right????

Ted · **Posted:** Sun Nov 23, 2008 10:09 pm

Let's give it a day or two and see how it goes. The admins will try and get in a couple of times a day to clear out any false positives. Hopefully once someone gets a false positive corrected once, it doesn't happen again.

And if we find it doesn't work well, we'll remove it and deal with the mess again...

Sonya · **Posted:** Mon Nov 24, 2008 8:14 am

Pierre M. wrote:

Popularity, yes, there are twice+ new members in the forum this month so far. Well, spammers and new members.

I suppose, it deals partly with cmsmadesimple.ru. I am trying to make CMS Made Simple more popular in Russia. However the popularity has its price. Hmm... Here is the statistic of cmsmadesimple.ru

JeremyBASS · **Posted:** Sun Nov 30, 2008 4:05 am

I'm sorry but I must ask again if we can do something to fix this... I'd still think that a threshold type approach would work better then just everyone.. I lost 3 posts today trying to help.. and then got some odd things to.. posted and then nothing showed up.. thought I made a mistake so I just reposted... then both showed up... so I deleted the first... then both disappeared... ... or I click submit and I acts like it's posting then it just stops... like nothing happened...

IMHO I'd rather deal with a captcha then this.... hard to help or get help if posting is hard...

anyways... thanks for the hard work trying to get the spam down... jeremyBass

Daniel15 · **Posted:** Sun Nov 30, 2008 4:11 am

Quote:

2. We have installed Akismet support in the forum. This may mean that posting is a bit slower, but should help solve our spam problems.

Akismet SMF mod by Daniel15?

It might be a bit buggy

Ted · **Posted:** Sun Nov 30, 2008 12:56 pm

I've removed it. Seems to be annoying everyone instead of actually doing it's job, so it's gone. We'll deal with the spam until we find a better solution.

JeremyBASS · **Posted:** Sun Nov 30, 2008 7:19 pm

for what it's worth I'm cool with typing a few letters and numbers for the sack of spam protection...

baresi · **Posted:** Sun Nov 30, 2008 11:27 pm

The best solution is the question and answer that comes with vBulletin, when registering one must answer a question instead of going through captcha or depending on other tools, haven't looked at SMF in a while not sure if it's available for it.

calguy1000 · **Posted:** Sun Nov 30, 2008 11:29 pm

The problem is, we're not experiencing bots.

We're experiencing live people who are intentionally posting spam.
sometimes they register three or four days before they post.

Most of these people are posting spam intentionally, and probably by manually copying/pasting some text into an edit area.
There is no capcha mechanism that can prevent this.
There is no better way to prevent this, than akismet.
I'm gonna re-tackle this issue.

Spam reduction via akismet

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