Removal of Spam threads.

what about limiting the number of new users in an hour/day?

Originally Posted by astrogeek Wall of SPAM, Tuesday evening... *** Update to the Update First post was at 9:30PM. It is now about 2:30AM and there has been no letup. So as of now, 5-1/2 hours and counting few "customers" have been served. Eight pages deep in the Newbie forum to get past the spam... This one appears more aggressive than previous instances, with greater number of user names and faster delivery rate per user too. Most are staying below 50 posts per user, but some are now above 160 posts, likely 200+ but I am too tired to track them any more tonight. My sympathies to the admins who I am sure are dealing with it all.

It's either indicative of the local time zone they are coming from, or perhaps they've learned the time frame when people are responsive, and fighting the attacks.

using the first few chars as line delimiter you can disable posts containing the same line of text 3 or more times.
Or just check if the subject can be found in the body 3 times....
Is this feasible?

22 pages of it in https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-8/page22.html

Would it be prudent to filter out non-english subject lines?

Here they come again.
One thing sure: these people hate Free Open Source Software, or even GNU/Linux because they don't mind of the noble things done here for free, at least, they should respect the charity found in us.

Originally Posted by Habitual 22 pages of it in https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-8/page22.html

There was a little over 25 in "Zero Reply Threads" as of around 6:50 a.m., with roughly three or four normal threads sprinkled in.

Regards...

Yeah looks like the damage is isolated to the Newbie forums for now at least.

17 pages deep right now.

I still don't understand why it would be so evil to place a limit on the number of new threads a new member can make in a day? Does a legitimate new member honestly need the ability to start more than, say, 3 new threads on their first day? Even if they did, I'm sure if they saw a message when they went to open their 4th that said something along the lines of "You've hit your limit for new threads for the day, please give the LQ members time to respond to your original questions before opening more", they wouldn't mind at all. And if that DID make them angry, are those really the kinds of members we want here anyway?

While the new filters caught most of this, an obviously unacceptable amount got through. The cleanup is processing and some additional filters have been added. Thanks for the patience.

--jeremy

Originally Posted by suicidaleggroll 17 pages deep right now.

Persistent little b*****s, aren't they? To me, this attack looks a little worse than the last one, but that may just be what gets past the filters...

Originally Posted by suicidaleggroll I still don't understand why it would be so evil to place a limit on the number of new threads a new member can make in a day?

Nor do I, but it might not be constructive. If we did go down that path, it may be what happens is that the evildoers just pre-reserve a whole bunch of identities, keep them for a week without posting and then unleash their wall of irrelevancy... Not sure that would help all that much.

It would, of course, irritate all the 'my problem is important, I need to cross post in to all the forums' crowd, and that, of itself, might be an advantage.

As an aside, and given that I appreciate the work done by the mods, if you feel that it is of any use having additional volunteers to manually do anything with this sort of outbreak, I volunteer. My suspicion is that this is probably the wrong time, given that an existing mod would have to walk me through this stuff, and that existing mod may well be better employed on something else at the moment, but the offer is still there, for what it is worth.

I consider LQ to be my "home", so I'll help defend it and help take out the Trash.

Originally Posted by salasi Persistent little b*****s, aren't they? To me, this attack looks a little worse than the last one, but that may just be what gets past the filters... Nor do I, but it might not be constructive. If we did go down that path, it may be what happens is that the evildoers just pre-reserve a whole bunch of identities, keep them for a week without posting and then unleash their wall of irrelevancy... Not sure that would help all that much.

And that's exactly why the first-few-posts moderation would work. Even if they pre-reserved a thousand ID's, those posts wouldn't ever hit the forums.

It would, of course, irritate all the 'my problem is important, I need to cross post in to all the forums' crowd, and that, of itself, might be an advantage.

...back to "first-few-post" moderation....

As an aside, and given that I appreciate the work done by the mods, if you feel that it is of any use having additional volunteers to manually do anything with this sort of outbreak, I volunteer. My suspicion is that this is probably the wrong time, given that an existing mod would have to walk me through this stuff, and that existing mod may well be better employed on something else at the moment, but the offer is still there, for what it is worth.

I agree, and would also volunteer. A 'limited moderator' role might be in order...someone who could only ban a user/hide posts, to keep spam at bay until someone else could make a decision/delete wholesale.

I agree with both salasi and suicidaleggroll, I know we all want to keep the forums open and friendly but as it is the forums are getting almost unusable, people who come here regularly know the mods are doing their best and are doing a good job, but at the same time any newbies comeing to forums and seeing all the spam are just as likly to leave without even signing up, in my opinion getting a mod to check the first couple of posts from a newcomer or limiting their ability to post numerous threads is surely the lesser of two evils.

As P.S. I would also be happy to help out in anyway possible even if it's just emailing newbs to veryfy that they have a valid email and are a real person.

It appears a major part of our anti-spam infrastructure was not operating as expected for the duration of this issue. I apologize to all members and mods. It's up and running now and should massively impact this issue moving forward. I'm looking into the root cause now.

--jeremy

Thanks for your continuing efforts to keep things going here.

Bummer to hear that something was not working as expected, I hope the cause was benign.

But that too, can be a symptom of how overwhelming the problems are on the internet today - we run so many overlapping layers of complexity at so many different points in the process that it can be very difficult to know with certainty what is working as expected and what is not. It can even be difficult to know what "working as expected" actually means!

Let me add my own offer to help in any way possible if the problems persist. As others have already said, if some users can be given limited powers to intervene in active attacks, that might make a very effective form of first responder, almost always live on the scene.

I know there would be much to consider before implementing something like that, but should you decide to do so I'll gladly volunteer whatever I can to the effort. This is also my home on the internet, and worth defending!

Thanks as always!