Spammers

[#1]

Perhaps a dumb question, but I have seen a few of these spam posts now, but how do you report them?

No doubt when someone says it will be obvious, but I have not found an option yet!

[#2]

Post Options - Report to Moderator

[#3]

Cheers Oldjim, knew it would be obvious!! I had been look at thread options.

[#4]

Are there any automated spam management tools for Lithium? I find Stop Forum Spam quite effective for Vbulletin but I don't think it supports Lithium. Having a Q&A for HVM used during signup rather than Captcha etc works well too.

[#5]

Hi @southerner, there is a built in tool that the admins can use that will automatically flag up suspicious posts and threads. It is currently not activated but we are looking at enabling it as I have seen and reported a couple of posts myself. We got a few mods and admins monitoring everything so they are being picked up and dealt with quickly but to have a more automated approach for this would make it easier on them. Just need to make sure it doesn't flag up too many legitimate posts and thus causing more work than it did before. Hopefully that will not be the case but we will have to see.

In the meantime feel free to report any posts you feel are suspicious in nature and the mods and admins will have a closer look to see what action needs to be taken.

Moderator's note by Mike (Mav): Full quote of preceding post removed as per Forum rules

[#6]

In theory you could limit the work load this utility had to do by ignoring post from Plusnet's IP Blocks, but this might not be possible of course.

Yep, I know all of these 10ps lying around on my desk, when will they run out!

[#7]

The spam control option has been enabled since yesterday evening. We did some testing during the day and I had created a few spam accounts on the staging environment and after a few posts being marked as spam by users my spam account got flagged as a spammer and so every post after that got chucked into a quarantine where mods could decide that users fate. So far so good then.

We are going to see how well it performs in the live environment and hopefully it will help the mods and admins keep the spam to a minimum.

It's always useful to report anything you think is suspicious too so keep them coming!

[#8]

When I signed up yesterday, there was no bot or any security, which was very disappointing to see, especially in this day & age.

As soon as I signed up I was in, no waiting for the email verification link to verify first & foremost.

---

@Anonymous wrote:

Yep I saw those as well, but but the time I tried to read one it had been removed, so someone's on the ball. Obviously I'm using my account from the old forum, but when signing up for an account are there any bot protections in place?

Also I've noticed what I think is about 400 new users since launch, but the post count on the site don't really reflect this.

---

[#9]

---

@jaread83 wrote:

The spam control option has been enabled since yesterday evening.

We are going to see how well it performs in the live environment and hopefully it will help the mods and admins keep the spam to a minimum.

It's always useful to report anything you think is suspicious too so keep them coming!

---

Can you advise, how effective it has been to date please.....

[#10]

Just FYI as mentioned in another thread

@jaread83wrote:
As for the spam filter, we do not know what algorithm it uses to determine whether a post is spam or not. It has caught a lot of legitimate spam though! Sometimes real posts get caught but after we mark it as 'not spam' the system should learn from that.

As you've probably deduced by now if you've been reading around this board, fixes to some of the fundamental issues with this "leading" forum software are undoubtedly on some form of priority list at Lithium.

[#11]

---

@Welshdragon wrote:

Can you advise, how effective it has been to date please.....

---

Very effective. I can't divulge exact numbers but what I can say is that you would definately notice if we turned the filter off.

[#12]

Thank you jaread83, glad to hear that it is working well....:)