Alot of SPAM lately on this forum!

Cato

What’s happening? I get lots of asian (Chinese?) spam-posts in my Feedly feed today from Magic Mirror forum.

yawns

@Cato
I already mentioned that in the internal forum. We need to find a way to block these kinds of “users” (bots), without anoying the real users.
I deleted more than 20 spam posts and banned 6 (or 7) users within 10 minutes, this is really frustrating.

Cato

What about CAPTCHA? Wouldn’t that stop most/all bot activity?

yawns

@Cato said in Alot of SPAM lately on this forum!:

What about CAPTCHA? Wouldn’t that stop most/all bot activity?

We do have a captcha to register for an account.
You have to click the “I am not a robot” checkbox and select pictures according to a specific question.
But that does not seem to be enough. I am not sure if you need to verify your account by clicking a link in an email. Maybe that could be another hurdle

Cato

Verifying email should be a minium. If the problem still occurs, maybe using CAPTCHA for every post? It’s just one extra click…

Cato

Over 120 SPAM posts today! Please do something…

yawns

@Cato said in Alot of SPAM lately on this forum!:

Over 120 SPAM posts today! Please do something…

In fact it was more than 200, and I deleted most of them on my smartphone after waking up. We are discussing possible steps internally

Mykle1

I was here last night for the onslaught. It was horrible. I was fully armed and wanted to nuke the bastards! :-)

cowboysdude

Don’t they have a captcha system?

d3r

It’s seems to be getting worse. I just signed in and I see about 20 of them in recent posts. Can something be done?
Maybe prevent posts with Chinese characters from being instantly posted since most of the spam are not in English.

d3r

Or make new posters go through a 5 post vetting process where their posts would need to be reviewed before being made public.
Not sure how the logistics would work since the mods would still need to review a lot of posts.

Cato

Moderation is probably too much work and makes the forum less instant.

I wouldn’t mind to click a CAPTCHA every time I post something. But I guess the problem is support for such feature on the forum software…?

rudibarani

I would suggest to force a captacha for the first XX number of posts of a user. Once the user seems credible, you can most certainly leave it out for this person.

cowboysdude

Not too sure either but it needed to be addressed after the 1st time it happened.

THIS has been a problem for others running NodeBB. Here’s an answer:

https://community.nodebb.org/topic/3036/spam-control-options/2

Mykle1

nodebb-plugin-spam-be-gone

Spam Be Gone 0.4.x uses Google’s “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” which does not support the old public/private keys, so you need to generate new ones and replace the old ones in your NodeBB Admin Panel, or you will see an error instead of the captcha image, visit this page to do so: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/admin#list

paviro

We already used nodebb-plugin-spam-be-gone for Googles reCAPTCHA but that did not help as it seems…

I enabled Akismet again (disabled because it stopped some people from posting legit stuff). It should prevent most of the SPAM for now but some people might run into issues, let me know if you do!

Email verification was already enabled but I will check whether it really works.

yawns

@paviro said in Alot of SPAM lately on this forum!:

Email verification was already enabled but I will check whether it really works.

It was enabled, but not mandatory. I created @yawns-test, did not verify the account via email but was able to post on the forum.

paviro

@yawns Mhh admin panel says “email verification required” will check if there is a second option somewhere…

Mark Coniglio

@paviro: I am another user of NodeBB with a big spam problem. I’ve written you a Chat message seeing if I can learn what you did to solve the problem on your forum. Thanks in advance for any advice you might be able to offer.

doubleT

I’d also welcome a solution that the first few posts are somewhat restricted. For example, if you have a post count below 10, allow the start of only one thread every hour. Should be enough in the beginning.

And then, would it be possible to implement a solution, that if a thread of someone in this restricted user group is flagged as spam (maybe by two or three people in the unrestricted user group in a short time), it will be unpublished immediately and marked for moderation? This forum is pretty civil and I’d think abuse of this function would be low to zero.