Thread

How difficult is it for you guys to create a query that will delete user profiles that contain references to prescription drugs?

Here, let me help you find some: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site:codeigniter.com +“no prescription”

Its sickening to see the forum membership saturated with spam profiles.

wow someone pissed in your Wheaties this morning.

@trs21219, Your contribution to this thread is as helpful as always. Thanks.

@Sock Puppet, There is no need to browse the memberlist. The spammers most probably sign up while you guys are sleeping so you don’t see them as often as I do.

Their ridiculous profile names dominate the forums new memberlist until a few regular members sign up too and shift them off.

At present there are about 1800 user profiles containing this type of spam.

Oooooohh…. they’re giving you the silent treatment, wd!

How difficult is it for you guys to create a query that will delete user profiles that contain references to prescription drugs?

::sigh::...wiredesignz if that was all there was to it, this wouldn’t be an continuing problem, but thank you for once again bringing up the issue in such a respectful and professional manner. 

I’ve tried kindly on numerous occasions to explain the whole picture to you and you just don’t get it.  Even if you choose to spend your time and train your eyes on new registrants and browsing member profiles (which makes the impact of this type of spam self-inflicted), you do not have access to all of the metrics necessary to determine who is and isn’t okay to delete and ban.  And even if you did, it’s very easy as a human to look at the information and say, “duh that’s a spammer”; it’s an entirely different matter to turn that judgement fully over to an automated solution.

This is not a fan site, we don’t have the luxury of being able to make mistakes with false positives, nor do we have the time or desire to pay someone to spend all day making those judgement calls.

I’ve always agreed with you that the spammers suck and that we hate them an equal amount, the difference in opinion is in what action to take, and what priority EllisLab should give it.  Yesterday, a company holiday, was honestly the first day I’ve had in probably a year where I had the convenience to sit down and craft some solutions that should minimize the spam while fully meeting our needs.

First and foremost was getting rid of many known spammers from our membership, finding new patterns, new spam email domains, updating the ExpressionEngine.com Blacklist, and deleting thousands of spam accounts (follow the links in your Google search above to Error pages).  We’ve been employing Bad Behavior since this summer, and it’s helped with bot traffic, but not much with spam since the majority of spam is posted by unfortunate humans hired on the cheap at terminals.

So I also went ahead yesterday and created an extension to integrate Akismet, fitting it to match our own needs, particularly in providing us with information about requests being flagged as spam, and in handling false positives.  I’m happy to report that in less than 24 hours, over 80 registrations / profile edits have been successfully caught, with no false positives.  I do notice that there is a particularly prolific brand of spam that our forums get that Akismet oddly does not recognize as spam, but perhaps it will learn.  I’ve Blacklisted those patterns though, so new attempts to post those should still not make it through.

I’m wondering how much business EE gets from the CI community? Would a little investment here be a good business decision? Probably.

Anyway, great work Derek. You accomplished a lot in one day!

Thanks Rick!  With respect to the financial impact, the CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine web sites share a single member database, so one site is not more or less affected than the other by the ridiculous amount of profile spam that we’ve been plagued with.  So decisions for our assignment of resources and priority on addressing this issue have always considered both products and communities.

Thanks for the response Derek! Good to know some of the measures being taken. Hopefully the askimet plugin will take care of the majority of the spam and we can kick some ass with catching the things that fall between the cracks.

@Derek Jones. Thanks, but I do understand everything you say, I just don’t agree with your point of view or your instructions on how to use the forums.

In any case there has been a noticeable reduction in spam since xmas. Thanks for your efforts.