[Movie SPAM] ..Can't we just bar users with under 10 posts from the "off-topic"?

[Remy X]

Almost every other day there's someone posting here in the middle of the night, advertising either Twilight or the latest Bollywood movie, and as usual, those users have zero posts.

Those people promote piracy and add nothing to the community, so i feel that a 10 post rule makes sense. It's pretty lenient, but would at the same time cut 70% of the spam, so it's a win-win for everyone, and even saves the spammer some effort

[GMMan]

But what if they start putting it into other forums? They were nice enough to keep it in off-topic.

[Remy X]

Originally Posted by GMMan

But what if they start putting it into other forums? They were nice enough to keep it in off-topic.

If it's an automated script that posts to several dozen forums at once, they might not even realize that something is broken... but the best way to eliminate them would be to let them post in the off-topic, but auto-delete the thread if it matches the criteria of having the word "watch" and the user having zero posts

If anyone is wondering why i even care, it's the malware factor... i haven't bothered to investigate, but everything free comes with a catch, so i have every reason to believe there is a criminal intent in this in addition to spam and plain old piracy.

[HelloNNNewman]

It happens. There is a TON of spam posted that you members don't see that does get caught by the filters. Some stuff is bound to slip through, but we are giving the Admin info on those items to add to the filters. Spammers gonna spam.

[ToniCipriani]

If it's piracy posts then it infringes the board rules already. Just hit the report post to get it killed.


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[Remy X]

Originally Posted by ToniCipriani

If it's piracy posts then it infringes the board rules already. Just hit the report post to get it killed.


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I do that each and every time. And by sometime next morning, our wonderful mods remove it

But that's a waste of everybody's effort...

Sure, the "sporgery" in question passes the spam filter every time due to its relatively varied body text, but the title always contains the words "watch" and "free", and the user is always only a few minutes old with no posts. Hence my suggestion that something be done, as a more mechanical means of keeping multimedia "pirates" off our ship

[HelloNNNewman]

Not sure how exactly that is a "waste of everybody's effort". Seems like a weeeeeee bit of an overstatement.
It isn't as easy as setting a filter to watch for a single word within a certain post count. Out of the hundreds of spam messages that we do get, there will always be some that get through as spammers adjust their spam-bots. If we start constricting our spam filters too much, we will start moderating (holding for approval) perfectly legitimate posts. This happens once in a while on the comments section of the front page... and when a member's comment gets accidentally caught by the filters, the member usually goes ballistic and accuses us of "censuring the comments" (as has been said recently).

There's a fine line between not catching enough, and catching too much (where member posts start getting caught too). As the spammers adjust their attacks to circumvent filters, we will always be adjusting things on our end to plug those new leaks. It may seem annoying to see some stuff (sometimes seeming to be duplicates) sneak through, but it's the nature of the beast. One that - from behind the scenes - has been beaten into a MUCH more submissive state than it was even a year ago. Over the past year, only a fraction of what used to get through is making it in now. From the mod's viewpoint (since we are the one's who have to deal with it), we have seen the number of spam posts getting through to the site drop dramatically over the past year (and we give Admin a huge 'thanks' for that). Some still gets through (as it always will), but we'd rather have a few slip past for us to deal with manually versus setting the filters too high and having members start thinking we are censuring them because the filters moderate a post of there's because of a couple of key words.

[GMMan]

Ahh, I see how they do it. They send something innocuous, with no links or red flags other than the title, then change it 5 seconds later to the spam content.

[HelloNNNewman]

Originally Posted by GMMan

Ahh, I see how they do it. They send something innocuous, with no links or red flags other than the title, then change it 5 seconds later to the spam content.

They have lots of little tricks that we keep fixing.