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 Fighting spam

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graz
Chief SQLTeam Crack Dealer

4149 Posts

Posted - 2009-04-07 : 11:41:49
We continue to fight people that spam the forums. We want to give you a clean place where you can ask SQL Server questions. Over the last two days I rolled out some code updates to Snitz. I always hate to modify the code but it really made sense in this case.

First, I coded up a little screen for the moderators to remove spam. They can lock a user's account, lock the thread and move the thread to a private spam holding forum. If it turns out we we're too hasty we can always put the thread back. I prefer to lock accounts rather than delete them. That way an email address is in use and can't be reused. That doesn't affect the bots but hopefully will inconvenience actual people that spam the forums. I'm going to write a job that that will go through our private spam holding forum and delete locked messages that are more than a certain number of days old. Probably a week or two.

We also discovered that people were creating accounts but never posting on the forums. In their profile they put links to spam sites. These spammers are a little more clever. There are around 800 of these accounts right now and this practice just started in the last few months.

In response to this I updated the public profile page to hide this information until a user has fifty posts and their account is unlocked. I might lower that number but that seems reasonable for now. They can still create the accounts but no one will see what they put in their profile.

If these accounts continue to be created I'll look into hiding those fields from the registration form until the user has fifty posts. That's a harder page to modify and I'd like to avoid it if possible.

Thanks and keep asking questions!

-Bill

=================================================
Creating tomorrow's legacy systems today. One crisis at a time.

madhivanan
Premature Yak Congratulator

22864 Posts

Posted - 2009-04-27 : 09:11:43

I see that lot of spam posts have only Question marks in the subject. If possible You can prevent it from posting if subject has only question marks

Madhivanan

Failing to plan is Planning to fail
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SwePeso
Patron Saint of Lost Yaks

30421 Posts

Posted - 2009-04-27 : 09:55:55
Aren't question marks unicode characters gone wrong?



E 12°55'05.63"
N 56°04'39.26"
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robvolk
Most Valuable Yak

15732 Posts

Posted - 2009-04-27 : 10:13:05
I believe most of these are. I'd recommend against trying to programmatically deal with it, at least for the time being. We'll end up with more spaghetti code.
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