Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Spammer on the Forum?

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
Thanks again for your hard work! Not trying to add to your load, but one had over 100 entries yesterday and another has just started today with 25 already - can spam alerts be pushed to all moderators to catch them more quickly? How about limiting new members to one post a day for the first week or two? If we don't come up with a solution, soon it won't be just a page or two of spam in "new posts" to scroll past, it'll be hard to find real content.

If you select ignore off the spammer's profile, all their threads go away. (at least for me, only took ~5 instances)
 
  • Informative
Reactions: idoco
Would it help prevent the spam attacks if new users first post or two had to be approved before it could appear? Or do spammers have a way to get around that?

I don't know exactly. I've had some spammy messages from new users land in my moderation queue (which I usually deal with right away) but I don't know if there is some other criteria at work too.

To the person who mentioned checking "new posts", I honestly hadn't thought of that. It's one extra thing to do however, and I can probably speak for most of the moderators when I said I'd rather be reading and writing real posts rather than patrolling. I'll go take a look right now and see what we have.

Bruce.
 
Thanks...we try! We do have people in different timezones, but an additional complication is that most moderators only work a subset of the forums. For instance I only moderate the Model S and Model X sections. If you report a spam in some other forum, I won't see the report, and even if I did, I wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

Bruce.

PS. Note for site admins: I am not asking to moderate additional forums. :)

One of the forums I moderate is a little smaller than TMC but the same scale and I just moderate two sub-boards. Dealing with spammers there is a pain.
 
I don't know exactly. I've had some spammy messages from new users land in my moderation queue (which I usually deal with right away) but I don't know if there is some other criteria at work too.

To the person who mentioned checking "new posts", I honestly hadn't thought of that. It's one extra thing to do however, and I can probably speak for most of the moderators when I said I'd rather be reading and writing real posts rather than patrolling. I'll go take a look right now and see what we have.

Bruce.

It depends on what the forum software can do, but some software packages have thresholds to prevent prolific spammers from joining up and going wild. Some require all new people to be moderated before posting, which is a pain for moderators. Others have limits like a few posts in a day until you reach 10 posts or some other limit. Few spammers are going to bother to be good forum citizens during the probation period and then spam away when the limits are removed. It still allows spamming from hacked accounts, but that's fairly rare.
 
  • Informative
  • Like
Reactions: .jg. and bmah
For the past 2 days, my “New Posts” feed has been clogged with spam. Reported both times.
The site is seeing a common pattern of spam influx around the same time each day. I’ve taken to reviewing both New Posts and also New Members each morning (US Eastern time) to flush it out. The site admins (@doug and @danny) are also tweaking the back-end to improve and automate our defenses as much as possible.

Also — for obvious reasons we don’t want to list all of the existing defenses that are in place :) but suffice to say that nearly all ideas or thoughts mentioned in this thread are already being accounted for in one way or another. It’s a tactical arms race to fight this stuff...
 
I noticed the forum was down for a while earlier today, was some new defense getting installed?

I don't get spammers. They are just ticking off everyone and probably not get much return for their effort. I guess there are just enough idiots who buy from them to make it worth it.
 
I noticed the forum was down for a while earlier today, was some new defense getting installed?

My understanding is that the downtime was unintended, and unrelated to the spam.

We (mods and admins) are doing our best to stomp this out, but please feel free to report anything you see that looks like spam in case we miss it.

Bruce.
 
Can the admins block new signups, or better still have a delay/cooling off period between joining and posting?

One of the things that is vital to keeping a forum alive is making it easy for legitimate new users to start contributing. I've run into it with some other forums I've been involved with managing. I've often joined forums to ask a question about something (usually a tech support kind of thing) and being locked out at the start would be very frustrating.

However, many forums have posting limits for newbies. I think one I've been on only allowed a few posts a day for the first few days. I think there was also a limit of only starting one thread a day for the first week or something like that. That doesn't stop the spamming, but it stops people from signing up and spam bombing the forum. It gives the moderators a chance to shut them down before they fill the forum with too much spew.

Another thing some forums have is the ability to black list certain IP ranges. If the spammer is using a VPN, it's not very effective, but if it's a spam farm that doesn't use VPN, it can be effective.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Sean Wagner
Sensible limits for new users are easy:
- only allowed to open one new thread per day
- only allowed to reply in own threads

On day two this limits start to rise.
Just ignoring the spammers is no solution. They register new accounts every few minutes.

TMC is continuing on its path toward uselessness.