This morning I came across a new spammer on g.d.o who had posted 1 story and 2 comments, all 3 of which have NOTHING to do with Drupal and are OBVIOUSLY SPAM. All 3 advertise some element of "Get Paid for your routine Surfing".
What are g.d.o's policies to remove spam & spam user accounts? How does g.d.o prevent spam?
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What do the principal g.d.o "People" such as Moshe want folks like me who have edit authority to do with spam content as we come across it? That is, do you want us to delete the spam content, email one of you with a "heads up," or something else? Also, what do you want us to do with the actual spammer? I strongly believe spam content and the respective spam account should be deleted (if the account only contains spam content; otherwise leave account intact). When it comes to deleting spam content and spam accounts, common sense and judgement should prevail as to what is "spam".
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What is used on g.d.o to prevent spam and which anti-spam module(s), either core or contributed, if any, are used? Any other "tricks" or code-magic used? I'm asking here so folks like me who use OG on our own respective web sites can attempt to simulate anti-spam efforts employed on g.d.o.
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I would suggest, just to make it official, that spam content is NOT allowed anywhere on g.d.o. Hard-core spammers won't care, but some folks will respect it. I'm not sure what the policy is on drupal.org, but a good place to add the policy on g.d.o, in my opinion, is the About page.
By the way, I cross-posted the link to this comment to an earlier comment on the g.d.o "Community" group which is titled What are people using to prevent spam signups and spam posts (and comment spam).
Thanks in advance!
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
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Comments
What do the principal g.d.o
I don't know about the "principals", but I usually delete the spam content and block the account. I believe that has been the generally accepted course of action, though I have seen Moshe sometimes use a battle axe to eliminate spam where a knife would have sufficed. :^)
In this particular case, for some reason Greg has given the person some benefit of doubt and has only removed a large chunk of the offending content (which caused me confusion, at first). Once I found the original post, I unpublished it. I didn't see any of the comments (maybe Greg removed them already), but if they were the same, then I'd delete the story as well.
Really, I don't think spam is allowed anywhere (not just on g.d.o or even d.o), otherwise it would not be spam. No, I don't think any spammer or would-be spammer will care. If the person knows it's spam, they're going to post it regardless of posted policies & procedures. If the person thinks it's NOT spam, then they're going to post it regardless of posted policies and procedures. Also, for a site like this one, I think having a posted policy saying what is generally regarded as spam will be rather tricky to word correctly so as to include as much as possible w/o stifling a group's creativity in pursuing their goals.
Agreed. Thanks for the info!
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
a policy?
if it smells a little like spam, it is. block the user and then delete the offending comments. you can see all his comments on his profile => track page. there may be more efficient ways to delete spam.
i recently added a custom profile question to registration which should block bots for a while. when it doesn't, i will change the question.
I noticed the bot blocker
I don't imagine it would be too difficult to do something that pulls a random word from a text file that could have any number of words. Then it would be easy to put, say, 10 or 20 words in there, and change them every 2 or 3 months with new and different words.
surprisingly hard
i started our like that but fapi made it real difficult to persist same word through the validation step. i have an idea now though that might work.
Will do. Thanks for the clarification!
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Is anything more efficient in the works to combat spam?
How about adding a check box to each individual post on the "Track" page along with a "Check all" box and a "Delete" button so that all of a spammer's posts can be deleted all at once? I've had the situation before where a spammer has posted a LOT of comments and deleting each one can be time consuming.
In the current case, a spammer luckily only made 3 spam posts. If I visit the spammer jbhodge's "Track" page, I see he has posted a spam comment to an Austin group's story, created a spam group that has nothing to do with Drupal (under moderation as of this moment), and created a spam wiki page on the St. Louis group. It would be easiER to click on an individual check box next to each of the spam postings on the "Track" page and then click on a "Delete" button than deleting each one individually. Even better, it would be easiEST if there was a "Check all" box at the top of a column of individual check boxes that would basically put a check mark in all of the individual check boxes. With the click of the "Check all" box, I could then click on a "Delete" button and ALL the spam would be deleted at once.
If my suggestion isn't already in the works, please let me know and I'll add it as a feature request. If I need to add it, to what project would I be adding the feature request to, OG? I looked at OG's feature requests and didn't see anything posted there.
Thoughts?
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
I just want to report it
Would be good to be able to mark a comment as spam, but I'm fine to just send a link somewhere if it is obvious how this should be done. These two comments are spam btw:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/26247#comment-113668
I am a bit baffled how legit users are so often prompted for CAPTCHA's, but would have thought that these ugg ads wouldn't have gotten through.
Anyways, would like the comments above nixed and the user blocked.
--
OpenConcept | Twitter @mgifford | Drupal Security Guide
More spam
http://groups.drupal.org/node/10318#comment-348669
Would be nice to have the Flag module to flag spam posts...
Someone got it. In the
Someone got it. In the future, please post an issue in the "Spam" category at http://drupal.org/project/issues/webmasters and include a link to the offending user. Thanks!
So difficult to report spam!!
I really don't want to have to spend 10 minutes hunting down the right way to report spam. Much of the time people won't bother to report it. I would like to have a button "Flag as spam" by each post. Surely we have a module to do this?
Some spam:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/103504#comment-353154
It's not that there aren't
It's not that there aren't any modules that do this... it's that there are very few people with the ability and decision-making power to set something like this up.
Mollom, which groups.drupal.org uses, doesn't yet have a "report this post" feature for the vast number of users on groups.drupal.org (I think Mollom for Drupal actually has only two permissions that can be granted to user roles). That would be a nice feature to have.
Possible method
A possible method would be to use the Flag module, to allow users to flag comments and posts (one flag per comment per user).
The Rules module can then be used to send emails when things are flagged, or, to reduce workload, perhaps when a certain number of people have all flagged the same content.
You could even set up Rules to un-publish the offending content when more than, say, ten people have flagged it as spam.
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If you're gonna use Flag maybe toss in http://drupal.org/project/flag_abuse as well.
Michelle
vote it down
If you vote it down, that helps. I'm using "comments with lots of down votes" to help find spam.
Obviously a down vote can also mean "I disagree with this" so we don't just delete all of the comments with down votes but we do use it to find content that might be spammy.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
Time to get to work!
This thread appears to have been going since 2007. Isn't it time that the debate about adding a "Flag as spam" stopped, and someone who has the skill/authority to do such a thing just gets on and does it?
I'm not complaining; I'm just pushing for anybody with the right skills and access to just set up a "flag abuse" system (any flag abuse system), and then we can improve and optimise the way it works later.