SPAMMERS are back in full force
 

Right now, looking at the bottom of the forum where online users are listed (some, anyway) I can count several accounts that are clearly SPAMbots. I also ran across one account that is a SPAMMER but not a bot. Allenly.

WTF? Has it always been this bad and I'm just now noticing it??

Ah.. now Allenly has created Allenly1. Joy.

Banned accounts still list on the whos online; what matters is that they can't post.
It's always been quite bad.

I think the current anti spam measures, especially during the registration phase, has been completely breached. I've probably deleted at least 100 posts today from spammers, and it's not even noon yet. I'm looking into what can be tightened asap.

I don't suppose banning by IP address would work? They're probably spoofing those, anyway, right?

WA, I offered a suggestion at the MAS contact us link. Don't want to mention it, here, but just checking if it was received?

Thank you,

I don't have access to that email, but I'm sure it's been received.

I got banned as a spammer but I wasn't spamming, I must have got caught in with a load of other spammers that got banned? My username is atomiku - can you unban please. Thanks

Looks to me that you were caught accidentally with the checkbox. As handy as those boxes are, its easy to accidentally check it.
Sorry about that, I've gone ahead and lifted the ban on that account. I believe it takes some time to refresh that profile rank though, so it'll say banned until the cron runs for it.

While I'll admit the irony of this post (possibly 'trolling' & continuing a thread) I think we should lay off the threads and continuation of threads about the spamming.... I've always seen the mods work to resolve spammers, and they've noted that they are working on it in several thread locations; I think of it as spamming, in a sense, as well.

@WolfShade:
I am not targeting you (please don't take offense), just offering a suggestion to all.

No offense taken.

I have zero complaints about the wonderful job the mods are doing to keep CF as free of bovine scatology as is possible. I also very pro-actively do my part by reporting bs as soon as I see it.

All I was doing was asking if it's always been this bad, or is this a new event as a result of the improved combat techniques. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to scramble from one thread to another, trying to stamp out the jerks who try to flood a decent forum with their unsolicited commercial targeting.

It hasn’t always been that bad and I don’t know what has changed lately. Maybe the spam bots got smarter or the challenge-response tests aren’t working, I don’t know. However, most of the spam I see lately is already filtered and in the moderation queue so what you see is just a fraction, and to me that doesn’t feel that much more, actually (except last weekend where it really was crazy).

The spam is way worse than I've ever seen. As WA said, I think the anti-spam measures have been breached and will need to be upgraded/replaced. We are trying to stay on top of it as much as possible while that work is being done.

Hopefully it won't be too much longer since I think the spam siege has slowed down posting by legitimate users.

We're all looking out for spam, you fortunately only see a fraction of what gets through. Moderating CF has been a full time job of late. For VIP anyway. He seems to get to most of them before I do. :)

Yeah, something has changed in the past couple of days though. Three days ago I was deleting hundreds of posts per hour that weren't queued. It was terrible D:
Still a bit higher than usual; a common tactic for non-bots is to post rubbish posts that are not actually spam, then edit the spam in. I can think of a dozen ways to prevent or eliminate the bot based spam, but real users is far more difficult. And I know we've had the discussion in the past; I personally don't think that posts for new users should be moderated.