Stop these 'Captcha' things please!

NAS18906 said:

Presumably the point of the spam is to enable their material to be found by search engines - i.e. the forum is just an unwitting host to content that people will find from google or wherever?

I believe so: an awful lot of it isn't really for the "benefit" of other forum members but is the infamous search engine optimsation nonsense that's often such a headache for most website operators (by which I mean the promotion thereof, rather than actually being usefully searchable).

I doubt that restricting the activities of the targeted search engine would make a great deal of difference as the bots don't really care and are the online equivalent of "being seen to do work".  That's the thing with fake accounts that they're unlikely to be paying for anywhere along the line, there's no incentive not to go with the "more is more" approach.

Another side I moderate has a new users' group where people eventually get moved into a regular users' group that doesn't have the restrictions and annoyances: whilst not absolutely foolproof, it's a system that works pretty well.

Tuesday 14th - another round of chinese spam has appeared.

Presumably the point of the spam is to enable their material to be found by search engines - i.e. the forum is just an unwitting host to content that people will find from google or wherever? Is the forum material indexed on chinese search engines - can this be stopped by appropriate antirobot files being put in place that will discourage indexing from there?

Hi

We are still having problems with the way the DRUPAL (community) software interprets the SPAM identified by the SPAM service MOLLOM. It should render it unpublished but it does not. The first bug fix has not worked so we are talking to the developers to get that addessed as a matter of urgency. This is very frustrating for us all. Please be reassured we are working on this as a priority.

The SPAM sofware should identify and trigger blocking to all posts not in english as well as key words. 

I'll keep you updated.. 

Regards

Bob: Digital Services Manager

The latest content page is only showing new discussions rather than showing all comments and discussions. Is this a side effect of the anti-spam measures? Can we have some sort of update on what is going on with the forum please?

No, I didn't know that. I didn't put it to the test in case it wasn't accepted and made me start over again. Thanks for the tip.

Just a FYI really - is everyone aware that the captcha thing doesn't distinguish between upper and lower case when you type the letters in? Sometimes the upper and lower case letters are hard to distinguish but Capcha doesn't care, it accepts all lower case.

Hi,

I/we really appreciate how annoying the capcha system is. We introduced it reluctantly for this weekend and until we have put some other measures in place. Moderators have been monitoring the site and taking down spam as soon at it is seen. After a quiet weekend (Capcha may be helping) I took some down this morning. We have also recruited two more volunteer moderators who will start to boost our responsiveness.

This attack has exposed some weaknesses in the security on the community and we are working with our developers SIFT and spam service MOLLOM to fix these issues. Clearly I can't go into details here.

We will try to get to a point where we can remove CAPCHA today or tomorrow.

Appreciate all members who flagged the problem

In the wider scheme of things I am pushing on (it has taken too long) with the project to upgrade the forum. I hope to be in a position to involve members in that project soon.

All the best

Bob: Digital Services Manager

I find captcha annoying, but hasn't been prohibitive for me on this site so far, i.e. I haven't had to make a second attempt due to incorrectly reading the characters to be entered. Not to say that others don't struggle with it.

I do think an automatic setting requiring moderator approval for the first x amount of new members' posts would help. It would have the disadvantage for new genuine people who want to post about and get quick feedback on a difficult situation, but maybe this could be balanced by promoting people to use the search facility for previous discussions of the issue, coupled with a prompt turnaround in approval of messages.

Or not permitting/requiring moderation of posts with characters other than those appearing in the basic Latin alphabet.

I wish we could just "send the spammers to 'Coventriey'" (as they seem to call it)!

Hi Technophobe,

The post about the composition of the forum must have come from one of the people who have been placed in the moderation queue (e.g. CC, longman et al) - there is a "feature" of the website that lets their posts through to subscribers on a thread but does not allow it to appear on the forum. There is no conspiracy here as far as I can see. There is just a buch of guys trying to keep a forum going for the benefit of a charity - not normally a well rewarded position and not normally a position that has a lot of resources to call on.

I had forgotten how long the china attack had been going on - I guess that we had both posted requests to the mods to take action. I'm sorry if you thought we were arguing about who should get the credit for raising the issue - I guess that the mods got plenty of complaints. I used to work for a company that suffered denial of service attacks and it is really difficult to work out how to filter out the spammers without stopping the websites business from continuing.

"Gee, you don't think its a ruse to change the composition of the forum
again?"  So, who sent this reply and then deleted it straightaway? It showed up in my email notifications, but it is absent on here.

Is this really going to dissolve into one of those pathetic forums where people just snipe at each other? 

It was the spamming from China I was complaining about a couple of weeks or so ago, so I think it may well be my complaints that got something done about this. in which case, great.  If not, thanks a bunch [admins] for ignoring me!

The amount of spam on one section fo the forum was becoming so ridiculous that after making several complaints I gavce up wasting time on signing in. Only reason I did today was that I was prompted to by an email reply alert.

Like I said in my last post, plenty of other forums manage to get by without this spam problem, and without making their members go through the frustration and stress of this 'captcha' process, so why cant this one?

Hi Technophobe,

No, the captcha thing isn't a response to your complaints but it is a response to horrendous and mindless spamming from China in the last few days. The forum has been almost unusable for the last fortnight but most if it has been removed by the admins who are doing what they can.

It would be good if known and trusted users could be whitelisted whilst new users could be required to do the captcha thing until they were seen to be genuine forum users - I have flagged this post to the mods to see if that is possible