Several months ago we saw a large bump in forum spam coming from the India / Pakistan / Bangladesh region. I started banning IP ranges, but they hit from so many I got pretty frustrated and banned an entire /12 for Airtel in India. (For those that don't know, that's basically a million IPs.) Forum spam dropped significantly immediately. However, it also blocked a large number of legitimate users. So about a month ago I dropped the /12 IP ban. Then sure enough, a few weeks later the spam returned. Now it's back in force.
We have a couple strategies we're mulling over to reduce this, and I hope to roll some of it out over the next few weeks. I appreciate your patience while we deal with it. In the meantime, reporting spammy comments and topics helps us a ton to get rid of it quickly.
Maybe add some verification measures when logging in and make it essential to verify your email before you can make forum posts. Might not eradicate the problem but for people using spam bots it might put a stop to them.
We do verify email before being able to log in. For a bit we saw automated email verification clicks from spam bots, but we've found workarounds to block those. In a nutshell, the spam we're seeing now isn't from bots. It's manual spam from humans.
Aaah I see... Still this forum has a lot less spam than I've seen in other forums that I use, and the community including myself seems to report it as soon as it's posted. And if you decide to put together a PcPP hit squad count me in ;) haha.
PC Part Picker Anti-Spam Squad.
Good to know the spam is being taken care of.
If there were signatures in the forums, I would SO add this to it. Now all we need is automated signatures. Guess I'll just manually type it in for now.
I still enjoy the occasional idiot who thinks that this forum is a good place to advertise his refrigerator repair store in Egypt.
I recomended a simple deterrent on the last one i reported. it wont end the problem, but may slow down the bots for a while.
Yeah... I banned that one but got a little giggle in as well.
I think the post was called "Man Power," which really could have been anything. After reading the post, though, it was clearly spam. The link itself was super obvious as well (I didn't click it though...I'm at work and would prefer not to raise any flags).
I just saw a bunch of spam, reported all the ones I found.
And again...Part List Opinions forum currently being bombarded. Adding new ones every few seconds.
I haven't really been seeing this...so good job mods I guess.