Thread

lol, it wasn’t meant as an instruction, more like

<cool_surfer_dude>
Relaaaaaxxxxx dude… like, we’re on it… ya know…
</cool_surfer_dude>

Should be all clean now.

Has anyone noticed a huge increase of spam coming through lately in their emails? Ever since Friday afternoon, gmail has been consistently missing about 10 spams per day. I use to only get 1 spam every month lol… What is going on?

Although I havn’t been getting as much as you, I did get 2 this morning (for the first time in ages) and they where both from something I was getting before and had been filtered out in the past 😖

The only thing I can think of that I did this past week was sign up for wordpress (no blog, just for the Askimet key); and I would highly doubt they would be in the business of selling email addresses, considering they came up with the system to prevent spam.

The only thing I can think of that I did this past week was sign up for wordpress (no blog, just for the Askimet key); and I would highly doubt they would be in the business of selling email addresses, considering they came up with the system to prevent spam.

Exactly, they know how the spam filtering industry works, so they know how to get around it 😉

Same concept as our government having covert wars… haha. We sell the solution, and the means to the reason for having needs for a solution 😁

If the only benefit for spammers is having links in their posts to increase page rankings, why not require a user to have 10 legitimate posts before allowing them to add links to their posts or signature?  Having a democratic ‘Report as Spam’ function (reports by x number of members would auto ban the spammer) would ensure that spammers didn’t make it to 10 posts.

Occassionally a spammer might invest the time to make 10 legit posts before spamming, but at least you’ll have taken care of the low hanging fruit.  Maybe instead of 10 legit posts, the threshold could be based on a word count.  If new accounts were required to post 1000 words before getting link privileges, you’d all but guarantee that the spammer would reveal their lack of understanding of the forum topic.

To argue my own suggestion, a new user could just find a post and copy/paste it as new.  A big one with lots of code would get them past the threshold, and to us it would seem as though they had some knowledge of PHP or CI.

This is just a guess here, but I think most people who make their living by designing/developing for the web HATE spam with a passion.  I always assume spammers are those selfish opportunists who would gladly ‘disconnect the power’ on the internet if it meant they could finally afford that boat they always wanted.  Assuming this is true, I think a good community of designer/developers (like the one here at codeigniter) would probably not mind putting in a little effort to keep their resources free from spam.  You guys were good enough to code the entire framework, fix bugs, write documentation, build and host these forums, and give it all away for free to the good people of these forums.  Wouldn’t it only be fair that the people at Ellis could stop spending their time on spammers and let the people of these forums police themselves?

What about some sort of sponsorship system?  Or what if new members needed to get positive feedback before getting link privileges?  If a new member’s posts had a big bright note in the corner that said “Please sponsor me so I can obtain link privileges” and had a Digg style thumbs up/thumbs down function, it would allow forum members the ability to determine which memberships were legitimate or not.  The votes could be weighted based on the voting member’s total posts, which would keep new members from promoting their own accounts.

Speaking of ‘promoting accounts’, maybe instead of normal accounts and moderators there could be stages of an account.  Starting at a probationary period, several methods could be implemented in tandem that would remove the benefit of a spammer having an account.

I basically see this as a math problem.  People are spamming because they see it as an easy way to promote their site and/or make an easy profit.  If the ability to spam requires too much effort or time, they will seek out an easier site to spam.  We basically just need to turn the dial until we find a happy medium between “TOO MUCH WORK FOR A SPAMMER” and “NOT A PROBLEM FOR A LEGITIMATE USER”.  Maybe we can come up with a list of things that legitimate users WANT to do that spammers do NOT want to do and exploit it.

that all will deter users from contributing to the site. it goes against the friendly atmosphere that the CI community is known for. requiring users to post on things just makes people post small useless comments to threads already in progress. such as “Wow. What a great Idea!” or “Thanks so much!”. the spam problem is being addressed as DAllard said before. they are working on it.

All I’ve really suggested is that users should not be able to post links immediately after opening an account.  They could still post URLs, and users could still copy and paste those URLs, but the main benefit to spammers is not that they expect people to click on their links, it’s improved search engine rankings based on links to their site from legitimate sites.  Why not just make people earn their right to post links?

I just stumbled on a really nice version of a captcha that is SUPER easy for humans, but likely impossible for robots.

http://www.serie3.info/s3capcha/demonstration.php

I have removed a spam link from Martin’s (m4rw3r) IgnitedRecord article in the wiki.

Something to watch out for is recent alterations to the wiki by members you don’t recognize from the forums.

Wow. I had no idea there had been any kind of “raid” to shut spam down. I guess I did start seeing less emails for a bit, but it’s at the normal rate of junk now.

Another idea I just had (thanks to a certain person spamming the job board as we speak) is to compare a post to their other posts. In this case, the spammer is using the exact same message on every thread, which is a definate warning flag.

Not sure how easy this would be to implement, but tbh, you would only really need the check the first 10 or so posts, as I’ve not seen a spammer make it more then that before they get caught

Wow. I had no idea there had been any kind of “raid” to shut spam down. I guess I did start seeing less emails for a bit, but it’s at the normal rate of junk now.

I’m just wondering about that guy above you. I don’t think he gets what ‘spam’ we’re talking about here.

@bargain

I think he might be referring to something earlier in the thread.  I believe some sort of combined governments actually did compose a raid against several large spamming perpetrators all at the same time, and it turned out that quite a bit of the world’s email spam all comes from the same few sources, which manifested as a clean spam inbox for a week or so.  I could be wrong though, as I usually am (display: hidden 😜).