I know this has been brought up already, earlier this year. But days like today where the forum board is just outright being assaulted by spammers (18 times in the last 5 hours). Something really needs to be done. They just about filled the first page of the forum.

If a new person to the forum really can't wait 24 hours for approval, with 2 factor authentication, then I guess they really don't want help do they.

It is loaded up with these scumbags this morning.

Another approach would be to give regulars the ability to mark a post as "spam". This action would temporarily remove any recent posts by the user and block any further posts. Follow-up by a full moderator could make the block permanent.

I suspect that the spammer is "paid" when the posts show up in a search engine. Rapid banning would reduce the "half life" of the posts and make the forum much less attractive.

This approach has been used successfully on another forum that I frequent. We went from pain and complaints to virtually nothing in about a week.

Seems like the forum moderator could just delete them all?

Yes, but the forum moderator operates from a specific timezone. Multiple mini moderators could span the zones.

And who gets to decide what is spam? As long as we don't see posts being marked as spam because somebody else doesn't like what they say.

If people improperly label something as spam, I'm sure several of us will object via new posts. There was still some reason and cooperation even in the worst days of our politically bent quibbling.

All the spams that I've seen, posted multiple new threads. Is there a way to create a rule on new people? Where an actual person asking for help will get through because they will most likely only post one new thread. But a spammer who creates multiple new threads will need approval... which of course will be looked at and denied.

KOT

In the forum that I previously mentioned only a few of us have spam removal authority. And we are responsible. The key is that we are spread across time zones. It is a little tricky when there are replies to spam or grossly abusive posts because simply deleting bad posts from one user leaves holes in the dialog.

In another forum it was clear that certain IP address ranges were "risky". These were blocked. Blocking ranges is not necessarily effective because the spammer could operate through a bot network.

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At one point I was the webmaster for a youth sports site. It amazed me that the spammers had quality control. The spammers were attempting to use an old forms exploit to send pedophile junk to the site admins. Our forms were not exploitable, but I could see the attempts. I started playing with the spammers by changing the address of the forms, causing their attempt to obviously fail. They did not respond to my first change for a few weeks, then they updated. I immediately changed again, deliberately changing the file names in a sequence (file1, file2, etc.) The next response was only a couple weeks later, then a week, finally an hour or two. At that point I figured that I had their attention and an IP address very close to the source, but I was bored and we were not using the forms any more so I deleted them. Maybe the spammer is still trying to guess the address.

As an “up at the butt crack of dawn EST dude”, it’s a daily occurrence for me (on RC). But someone is doing diligence every single day by my second cup of coffee.

If no one reports the spam be clicking the ! point in spam post, it might sit for bit over night.

I click the ! on every spam post that I see.

What "!"?

edit, Ahhh, I see it now.

I do as well

We found that there are multiple types of spammers. The quick strike individuals will register, then immediately blast a bunch of posts. Limiting day one posts can minimize their success.

But, we found another group that I call the "investor". We would find hundreds of registered users who never posted anything. They would have unimaginative user names such as 'qwerty', 'asdfg', 'zxcvb', etc. At first we simply ignored these users, but we found that they would show up months later and drop their load. From time to time one of us would go through the user base and remove or block these "investments". These were serious "investors" because full registration required replying to an email. We could also see the half registered users who failed to reply to the email.