How hard/expensive is it to add one of the "I'm a real person! Honest!" buttons?

There’s one of those for account signups, but it honestly does no good for the current issue, because 95% of the spam is coming from spam farms populated with real, actual people (although often written by ChatGPT). The fact that they typically go back in and edit spam into earlier posts is a big teller of that, because no automated script designed to work with popular forum packages will work with the abnormal structure / functionality of this forum.

I’m looking into adding link blockers / strippers for new accounts, but I’ve also seen spammers using multi-year-old accounts out of the blue. Although, far fewer of those than new accounts.

I was a moderator on an older community and we saw spammers “investing”. They’d open an account, then return in a year or so to drop their load. We’d also see people using far east IP addresses and would disable a block of them. Disabling a block of IP addresses may not work very well now because of the automated posting from a net of hacked systems.

For a while I was the webmaster on a local children’s sports site. We had a link to send messages to the coaching staff. There were some rather gross messages — recruiting and offering … . The messages were obviously sent by a bot, but there was quality control. After receiving one of these gross messages, I’d change the link on the site. After two or three weeks, the bot would be updated to use the new link and we’d repeat the drill. Over a period of months the period shortened. Eventually, the perpetrator would respond to my changes in a few hours or less and it was likely that he was directly responding. At about that time we took the site down as the operation moved to a larger site. Thankfully, I was out of the loop at that point.

I have entire COUNTRIES blocked at this point. India and Pakistan for two.

Can I be signed up to receive "It's My First Day!!" notifications?

Every one that I see that has a spam link I will delete on the spot.

Will be a great retirement job lol

with how slow the site is, maybe just require moderator approval for new posts from fresh accounts? i can't imagine that would take longer than finding the spam and deleting it.

Maybe I can be a moderator?

I'd like nothing better than to send people out to the nether world....LOL

Exactly. I pitched this several times, first post always gets moderated, and no links allowed for less than 10 posts.

I’m not sure how effective this will be. The spam bots could be tuned to create 10 dummy AI posts.

I think the most effective strategy would be to take the spam posts down (and block the sender) as soon as possible. This will reduce the spammer’s return on investment. As an experiment, try allowing longtime members to immediately block a post and send it for moderation. This will reduce the spam’s lifetime.

It doesn't block it but you can click on the ! at the bottom right of the post and put "Spam" in the message and send. This notifies Daniel.

Maybe there could be a way to look at characters and determine if they are the english alphabet. If it isn't then just don't allow it to post.

Something needs to be done. The site is losing its value, and if spam is all that shows up here, it will become irrelevant. That would be sad. Unless even spam clicks give the site some sort of credibility?

I dont understand why you have to beat us to death on this. The spam gets cleaned up in a reasonable time frame. We cant be online 24/7. there is a lot less spam here than I see on my facebook timeline on a daily basis.

8(

I tend to browse on here around 4am EST. Report those spam postings from overnight. I would volunteer to have those flagged for approval.

My idea is for me to flag them, which will remove the posting until a Moderator can approve to have it posted again or deleted.

Just a thought.

KOT

One person no, but five (say) persons in different time zones can (almost). I live in Europe (MET = GST+1) and would volunteer.