Starting this post because we're unfortunately seeing an increase in spam on this lovely forum. I had a Twitter chat with Morten Bock, Dirk De Grave and Richard Soeteman about what we could try to do, to decrease the amount of spam. But I realised 140 chars is just not enough...hence this post :)
What can we do to decrease the amount of spam posts? Obviously the gentleman agreement you need to accept before finalizing your signup is not very effective since it's just a checkbox and no-one probably reads it anyway. "yeah yeah just le me in!".
So just curious to hear som inputs on how we can handle spammers without annoying all the new friendly people wanting to help or ask question on our?
Maybe email verification will help then you can block email adresses or whole domains if that comes from spam accounts. But whatever gets done about this,the good don't need to pay for the bad guys. I would not use the forum as a first timer if posts gets moderated or something similar. Remember that we are the world's friendliest community :)
Exactly Richard, we are the most friendly community in the world and we should always be that. I'm sorry (and also a bit surprised) if my tweets left another impression. And that's also why I'm asking how we could handle this in an open forum where it's more easy to express ourselves :)
E-mail verification will prevent spam bots but I think that most of the recent spam is actually done by real people. But perhaps it's something we just have to live with and just keep deleting and blocking since it seems to me it would be hard to make a simple solution, which does not scare newcommers away due to a hard signup proces. Signing up should be really simple imho...So...
I think moderation _could_ be done nicely, if a couple of things are considere. We could make the moderation transparent to the user. So to him, it looks like the post is there. We could make some sort of threshold for auto approving 80% of the posts. For example it could be based on some blacklisted keywords, an Akismet score and wether or not the post contains links.
As for who should do the actual moderation, I think that could be sent to the community. There are plenty of active users here with +50 karma for example, and whenever the first one comes around, he will be asked to determine of this "suspicous" post is in fact spam. That would take him 2 seconds, and maybe even earn him a bit of karma as "thanks for the help".
The original poster will never notice this, unless he immediately sends his post as a link to someone, or visits it without being logged in. And if everything is well, then it should be available within minutes anyway (we might need some traffic stats to prove this).
Email verification is probably easier to implement, and might be enough to get rid of the bots. I don't know if it is actually bots, or humans posting the spam here?
Email verification & captcha worked well for me when I ran my old clan forums.
Other useful thing is we restricted posting links until you had like 50 posts. This would prevent new users from posting urls. We would also notice when a user just spams to get to 50, then we would just admin delete all his/her posts.
Maybe it would be prudent for the freaking CORE TEAM to spend more time MODERATING this site and answering questions instead of wasting time throwing MORE code at an already horrible website. Really folks.... this entire project is becoming the poster child for poor decision making and mismanagement.
Dozens of post in EVERY FORUM go unanswered. In most cases when there is an answer from the "core team", the answer is "post it to the bug tracker" or "please vote it up". Meanwhile, Umbraco programmers are wasting time coding THIS SITE instead of answering questions, identifying user reported Umbraco bugs and fixing them.
This has to be one of the poorest examples of project management I have ever seen, and it keeps getting worse, not better. There does not appear to be any real focus on a goal and instead the focus gets wider and wider... blog posts, wiki posts, twitter posts, forum posts, project posts... information is fragmented at best.
Time to reign it in folks... The open-source-monster could not barf up a bigger mess...
The "old" forum site is riddled with (tens of) thousands of SPAM links and the management has been too lazy for years to lock the site down and clean it up. Not only is it lazy, but it is irresponsible to allow spammers to leverage the old forum to keyword pump their virus and malware laden sites.
As much as I love the umbraco product, the "shine" wears off a little more with each passing day. The laziness, disorganization, poor project managment and frankly, arrogance, are starting to take their toll.
I mentioned in another post about attempting (on numerous occasions) to get piers to adopt Umbraco. EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM has downloaded the project and visited this site for "getting started" support and/or discovery... then walked away laughing about how poorly every aspect of this project is managed. Not one of them would even consider adopting the platform after what they have seen here.
It is a shame to see so much talent and hard work tarnished by such poor focus and management.
Increase in spam posts
Hi all
Starting this post because we're unfortunately seeing an increase in spam on this lovely forum. I had a Twitter chat with Morten Bock, Dirk De Grave and Richard Soeteman about what we could try to do, to decrease the amount of spam. But I realised 140 chars is just not enough...hence this post :)
What can we do to decrease the amount of spam posts? Obviously the gentleman agreement you need to accept before finalizing your signup is not very effective since it's just a checkbox and no-one probably reads it anyway. "yeah yeah just le me in!".
So just curious to hear som inputs on how we can handle spammers without annoying all the new friendly people wanting to help or ask question on our?
Lets' have a nice discussion about this.
Cheers,
Jan
Hi Jan,
Maybe email verification will help then you can block email adresses or whole domains if that comes from spam accounts. But whatever gets done about this,the good don't need to pay for the bad guys. I would not use the forum as a first timer if posts gets moderated or something similar. Remember that we are the world's friendliest community :)
Cheers,
Richard
Exactly Richard, we are the most friendly community in the world and we should always be that. I'm sorry (and also a bit surprised) if my tweets left another impression. And that's also why I'm asking how we could handle this in an open forum where it's more easy to express ourselves :)
E-mail verification will prevent spam bots but I think that most of the recent spam is actually done by real people. But perhaps it's something we just have to live with and just keep deleting and blocking since it seems to me it would be hard to make a simple solution, which does not scare newcommers away due to a hard signup proces. Signing up should be really simple imho...So...
/Jan
I think moderation _could_ be done nicely, if a couple of things are considere. We could make the moderation transparent to the user. So to him, it looks like the post is there. We could make some sort of threshold for auto approving 80% of the posts. For example it could be based on some blacklisted keywords, an Akismet score and wether or not the post contains links.
As for who should do the actual moderation, I think that could be sent to the community. There are plenty of active users here with +50 karma for example, and whenever the first one comes around, he will be asked to determine of this "suspicous" post is in fact spam. That would take him 2 seconds, and maybe even earn him a bit of karma as "thanks for the help".
The original poster will never notice this, unless he immediately sends his post as a link to someone, or visits it without being logged in. And if everything is well, then it should be available within minutes anyway (we might need some traffic stats to prove this).
Email verification is probably easier to implement, and might be enough to get rid of the bots. I don't know if it is actually bots, or humans posting the spam here?
/Bock
There is also the option to build in a spam filter like Akismet, Mollom, or something similar.
Email verification & captcha worked well for me when I ran my old clan forums.
Other useful thing is we restricted posting links until you had like 50 posts. This would prevent new users from posting urls. We would also notice when a user just spams to get to 50, then we would just admin delete all his/her posts.
We used myBB for our forum software though.
Just for reference, I raised a ticket on the issue tracker: http://issues.umbraco.org/issue/OUR-53
Better to keep discussions here, but the ticket is so we can reference a fix in code/GitHub, etc.
How about this....
Maybe it would be prudent for the freaking CORE TEAM to spend more time MODERATING this site and answering questions instead of wasting time throwing MORE code at an already horrible website. Really folks.... this entire project is becoming the poster child for poor decision making and mismanagement.
Dozens of post in EVERY FORUM go unanswered. In most cases when there is an answer from the "core team", the answer is "post it to the bug tracker" or "please vote it up". Meanwhile, Umbraco programmers are wasting time coding THIS SITE instead of answering questions, identifying user reported Umbraco bugs and fixing them.
This has to be one of the poorest examples of project management I have ever seen, and it keeps getting worse, not better. There does not appear to be any real focus on a goal and instead the focus gets wider and wider... blog posts, wiki posts, twitter posts, forum posts, project posts... information is fragmented at best.
Time to reign it in folks... The open-source-monster could not barf up a bigger mess...
The "old" forum site is riddled with (tens of) thousands of SPAM links and the management has been too lazy for years to lock the site down and clean it up. Not only is it lazy, but it is irresponsible to allow spammers to leverage the old forum to keyword pump their virus and malware laden sites.
As much as I love the umbraco product, the "shine" wears off a little more with each passing day. The laziness, disorganization, poor project managment and frankly, arrogance, are starting to take their toll.
I mentioned in another post about attempting (on numerous occasions) to get piers to adopt Umbraco. EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM has downloaded the project and visited this site for "getting started" support and/or discovery... then walked away laughing about how poorly every aspect of this project is managed. Not one of them would even consider adopting the platform after what they have seen here.
It is a shame to see so much talent and hard work tarnished by such poor focus and management.
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