Many More New User Spammers Lately...

[Domagon]

While the influx of spammers has been increasing for awhile, it seems to be getting out of hand lately.

For those wondering what I'm speaking of, the spammers are subtle. Their posts will kinda be on topic, but often are very terse / bot-like.

Adding a "no-follow" to links may help (though would hurt many legit users here, and potentially NP itself in SE rankings), but likely won't do much to stem the tide.

Disabling signatures for new users would be more effective, but even that has limits, since the spammers can easily just post links (even disabling that won't fully stop them, since some simply seek to boost ranking of select keywords / brand names) within the body of the message itself.

Bottom line is NP should, if the staff / mods don't already, regularly go through the new members signups and look for similarities / discrepancies (user names, locations, timezones, IP ranges, etc).

And strongly consider new user approval be done by manually several times per day in batches - some forum spammers can be snagged that way, and helps stem the tide.

Overall posting activity at NP may look fine, but take a closer look at who is posting what and the quality of the replies - as of now, overall, the forums are still very good, but there's a tipping point that NP seems to rapidly be approaching where the spammers effectively takeover pushing out many of the regulars who contribute much useful information that makes NP worthwhile visiting.

Ron

 

[jdk]

There has also been an increase in bidders who do not follow through with their payments. When reported to NP no action is taken against these members resulting in them continuing posting sold in threads and not following through with sales.

NP needs to take action against these members and get them off the forums. Same goes with the spammers as mentioned above. If they are not going to follow the rules and act in a professional manner they need to be banned.

 

[Erdy]

I have reported a NP member 3 times for low quality spammy posts and NP has done nothing. The user is a representative of a registrar and usually posts things like this:

I suppose you can ask them.

I suppose parking can be good.

I suppose you can search on Google.

 

[mis_chiff]

There has also been an increase in bidders who do not follow through with their payments. When reported to NP no action is taken against these members resulting in them continuing posting sold in threads and not following through with sales.

NP needs to take action against these members and get them off the forums. Same goes with the spammers as mentioned above. If they are not going to follow the rules and act in a professional manner they need to be banned.

By all means, please report them - NP responds to and acts on
every scammer/spammer report we get.
and if you have reported them and they are still outstanding, please let me know,
There are currently no open reports, every one of them is taken seriously when reported.

What threads/posts/members are you referring too?

I'd also like to know which ones were reported and NOT acted upon Thanks

I have reported a NP member 3 times for low quality spammy posts and NP has done nothing. The user is a representative of a registrar and usually posts things like this:

I don't see any open reports by you either, can you
please report the posts and I will go check them right now.

 

[Erdy]

Hi Wendy,
Yes, I don't have any open reports because they were closed. I reported somebody 3 times for posting low quality spam like messages just to get his signature shown in as many topics as possible.


Here are my reports:
(I don't want others to see these topics but I guess ordinary members can't see them anyway, so I don't mind posting links here)

http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=704650
http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=690036
http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=690031

Basically this person opens any topic and then :
1) either repeats what others have said or
2) writes something very general like "it can be useful" or "make a search" or
3) quotes the last person and says "this is very useful"

This is so annoying. This is not a genuine domainer. I think he is somebody hired to post useless junk.

A genuine member would say things like "the information you are looking for is here: link" or "do this to solve the problem ...". They would not say general things without even reading the topic.

---------- Post added at 01:51 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:37 AM ----------
NP admins need to come up with a new strategy. There are a few problems to solve:

1) How do you spot users who always agree with others but don't have anything to say and the only thing they want is to get their signature shown in as many topics as possible?
2) What do you do with them?
3) How do you make it less desirable for those people to post spam like messages?

 

[Blake]

There has also been an increase in bidders who do not follow through with their payments. When reported to NP no action is taken against these members resulting in them continuing posting sold in threads and not following through with sales.

NP needs to take action against these members and get them off the forums. Same goes with the spammers as mentioned above. If they are not going to follow the rules and act in a professional manner they need to be banned.

Hello Jdk,

I am quite shocked by your statement and I find it hard to see how you came to this conclusion. As mischiff has said we take this very serious and remove members daily for multiple reasons. Now as far as your report listed here:

http://www.namepros.com/reported-threads/709102-reported-post-by-jdk.html

Your report Stats:

You reported at: Yesterday, 02:14 PM
I posted at: Yesterday, 03:16 PM

That to me doesn't say we are just ignoring it...I have asked you for more information in the thread and have as of yet gotten anymore information. So within 1 hour I responded and was ready to take action...so please don't think we are just laying down and taking it.

Anyhow there is a lot of work being done in the background here at namepros.com. The team you have is excellent and they work very hard to keep this place clean...and 100% clean is just simply not possible. We do the best we can and keep in mind this is a volunteer position and folks do it for the love of the forum!

JDK - message me or post in that thread with some more information and it will be dealt with right away

 

[Erdy]

I'm wondering how the "Reputation" feature works. Can another member give you unlimited positive reputation? If this is not possible then it is very good and this feature could be used for other things.

 

[mis_chiff]

Thanks for those links Erdy, 2 of 3 reports did have the post removed.
and fairly quickly from the report time.

The third one was more or less telling the OP to do his own due dilligence as each registrar
is different. - that one I didn't remove.

I have removed several posts since then and I try to check them often as I can
I do agree, this is an issue for this particular post types.
We appreciate the reports

jdk, I see the report Blake is talking about - he responded very quickly to you, (within an hour) and has been waiting
for your reply since yesterday - when you make a report it is important to follow through, if you don't follow
through and we doin't have enough info - what should be done then?
Either include all the info in the first report, of follow up as you ask us to do.

 

[DU]

While we're here... can we delete the "What's my .SO worth threads?" like we did the .CO threads?

 

[Erdy]

Hi Wendy,
Let's say we have many people who just want to agree with others and post some useless messages all the time. How do you solve this problem?

That particular person has around 1253 messages. So I reported 3 of them and and now he has 1250 messages. This doesn't seem like a solution to me. You might say, "What can be done?" This is exactly what I was hoping to discuss and I think it's the same with the OP.

How do you discourage people from posting useless messages and how do you encourage people to post more useful messages?

Unfortunately nobody from namepros takes those suggestions seriously but I will still post a few suggestions:

1) Close down the "Web Hosting Offers" forum section. This brings the wrong type of new users to NP.
http://www.namepros.com/web-hosting-offers/

2) For "Advertising & SEO Services" and "Developers For Hire" require 10NP$ to open topics.
http://www.namepros.com/advertising-and-seo-services/
http://www.namepros.com/developers-for-hire/

3) Ask the NP programmer to code a new feature like this:
Message Quality Score= Reputation points/Number of messages

Example: I have 2288 Reputation points and 1,804 messages. My Message Quality Score would be: 2288/1804= 1.26

That other user who posts spam like messages has about 100 Reputation points and about 1250 messages. His Message Quality Score would be 100/1250= 0.08

Calculating message quality score as I described above is a good idea because your score does not get higher or lower depending on number of messages you post. Even if you have 20 messages or 2000 messages, you quality score will be a realistic representation of the quality of your messages because it takes into account your reputation as well.

a) Display each users message quality score in his profile.
b) Don't display user signatures if their quality score is under 0.5
c) Create special forum sections where only users with a quality score of 1 or above can access.

A solution like this discourages people from posting junk and encourages them to post helpful messages.

Your solution of deleting reported messages does nothing.

 

[mis_chiff]

Your solution of deleting reported messages does nothing.

As you know Erdy, this is what I am able to do at the
moment when a report is made, anything else is not my call,
I will send a PM to RJ to address this for you.

Useless post pumping sig spam posts are usually removed as
soon as they are seen. 90% of the time the user is banned if
it's evident what they are doing.

But you have to keep in mind too that people are new and
inexperienced and sometimes come here for assistance and
sometimes their posts are short and confusing and it
sometimes appears it's all about the sig.

We have to check it out, we can't shut the door on every
newcomer cause we don't like how they post. But we do try
to weed out the bad ones.
Since we can't always get to every thread to check,
we depend on the reports of other members to let us know.



**Juanny, yes that is the next order of business

 

[Erdy]

Wendy, you are doing a good job as a moderator and it is nice of you folks to do this job on a voluntary basis. I understand that things you can do are limited.

I didn't mean to say you are not doing something you supposed to do. What I meant to say was, you and other moderators have limited tools to fight against this problem (low quality spam like messages with the purpose of self advertisement). It is not even a problem moderators can fight because of the complexity. However this new idea of message quality score could solve the problem automatically without anybody doing anything.

Maybe one thing you and other moderators are not doing enough is to explore possible solutions that could be implemented to the vbulletin system. (edit: thinking again, I agree that moderators are not expected to be technical. However they could report to the technical team and admins, a lack of tools to solve certain problems) I'm a believer of technical solutions to most problems even if the problems don't seem technical.

Generally speaking, most solutions can be found when thinking about the collective intelligence a forum has. This means if you are looking for a solution to any forum problem, look for a way that solves the problem by collecting data from many users. This is the strongest point of forums.

 

[mis_chiff]

Thanks Erdy

As technology, and the spammers advance, some tools are seeming obsolete,
I'm hoping the Technical team and Admin are always open to exploring options
to implement as we move forward.

 

[Domagon]

Firstly, in my experience, to be clear, NP is very responsive in regards to spam reports. No issues there, whatsoever. NP takes spam reports seriously.

What I was getting at is a more proactive approach should be considered - that is to say, preemptively deleting suspected spammers before they ever post at all.

Hence, the suggestions of going through recent user registrations and manual new user approval. Preemptively deleting suspected spammers comes with some risk in that some legit new users may be affected too, but likely the lessor of two evils at this point.

And more aggressive post deletion. Doing so comes with similar tradeoffs as above, but accidentally deleted posts can typically, at least for a time, be undeleted, so less of an issue there.

In short, NP should consider a more pre-emptive approach to fighting spam, and that will mean stepping on some toes (accidental deletions of some legit users / posts that appear to be spam) along the way.

On a related topic, Erdy makes a good point about some topic areas (forums) seemingly attracting the wrong type of crowd. Imho, no question about it - NP feels more and more like DigiPoint - whether that's desirable is debatable, the existence of them may be greatly contributing to the spam problems.

Ron

 

[Eric]

New member accounts are scanned several ways, but it is hard to catch every spammer. I admit one big problem at the moment is the signature spammers. 99% of the time, it's easy to spot an account that was created just for the signature links, but others are more difficult. I've recently added something that I hope will help reduce this, but I won't reveal the details here - wouldn't want to give potential spammers an edge up on it

 

[Coopey]

I try to report all of the obvious ones, and I add everyone I report to my ignore list too.
Hopefully Eric's improvements will stem the tide...

jdk, both non-paying users I've reported have been banned. I've been impressed with NP's response to every report on non-payment I've submitted.

 

[Eric]

Just wanted to give a little update. A new program that I've built & implemented here on NP was added late last night, and since then, it's blocked nearly 2500 bots/spammers on top of other measures we have in place.

 

[Michelle]

Just wanted to give a little update. A new program that I've built & implemented here on NP was added late last night, and since then, it's blocked nearly 2500 bots/spammers on top of other measures we have in place.

:great::kickass:

 

[Coopey]

Just wanted to give a little update. A new program that I've built & implemented here on NP was added late last night, and since then, it's blocked nearly 2500 bots/spammers on top of other measures we have in place.

Excellent news!

 

[Domagon]

Fantastic %%-

Ron

 

[DU]

I still get through and manage to make posts though :lol:

I hope people realize (a) How much Spam there is and (b) How hard it is to stay on top of.

Especially with those "services" that promise links from PR5 and PR9 sites!

 

[BillyConnite]

Especially with those "services" that promise links from PR5 and PR9 sites!

You mean i've been getting scammed this whole time?!?!?!!

 

[renek]

I have to say I do not see that much spam posts around the forum and have not yet received any PM spam on here. My compliments on that.
I guess the spammers should be easily filtered out through IP and posted link comparisons etc.