Proposal for spam management

I have an idea to run by you all. To help manage spam, since we’ve exhausted all other ideas really, is to figure out how many active mods we have. Then assign each mod part of the alphabet to police. Meaning, for example, if it works out where each mod could take 5 letters, I might be assigned letters A-E to prune daily or how ever often I’m able. I think once a chunk of usernames was brought under control it might not take as long if one was able to just check up on it everyday and try to spot new spammers in their assigned membergroup, especially after you became accustomed to the legit user names in your section.
Just thought maybe some organize and focus strategy might help us with these creeps.

Of course, anytime any of us see spam activity posted to the boards, anyone can take care of that right away. The assigned sections are only for upkeep purposes.

Want to give it a try? How many mods and admins do we have that are regularly active?

I’m here multiple times a day. Sections may work as there would be a smaller group to look at, with less chance of checking 10 accounts and finding someone else has already banned 5+ of them…

Yeah, exactly. I started just going down the list this morning. I will say I’ve been at it 45 mins solid and I’m just getting done with all the bad accounts in letter A so at first, it’s going to take a lot of effort. My hope is once that effort it put in in a focused way by each willing mod, it won’t take near as much time and effort to maintain.

Of course, I thought of the fact that spammers might slam us with names that end up in one person’s section, overwhelming them. If that’s the case, and you notice an unmanagable influx in your assigned area, just post for help as I’m sure that means there’s someone’s section not seeing much action.

Depending on how many people we have will determine how to divvy up the alphabet. The more mods, of course, the smaller our sections

Edit: I’ve gone on a banning spree…up to ‘C’ and working my way through. I’m on a mission

I like this idea What say you Manny?

It sounds good.

I am trying to log in as often as possible. I am always checking and banning Spammers.

So we have potentially 4 people on board with this? Anymore takers?

I got through letter C yesterday so I’m curious to see how bad a-c became overnight.

I also cleaned out a bunch of bad threads and the spammers that posted them last night, but I see overnight more came back. It’d be really nice if we can pre-emptively ban more of these guys, then just concentrate on keeping it under control.

I’ll start on F-J as time allows…

Alrighty, since I’m already mostly thru it anyway, I’ll do A-E and the little number ones too. If we get one more person, then about five sections per mod is about right anyway

btw, not many in a-c joined last night so pruning that part this morning was EASY. so yeah if we can get our sections cleared and stay reasonably on top of it, that should help tons!

Thanks

I fot from F though Gar so far, so shouldn’t be too bad, I don’t think.

Yup. Hopefully we get some volunteers for the rest of the alphabet, but I finally got thru A-E so it’s just a matter of upkeep now

Purrsia please let me know how i can ban spammers alphabetically and i am right on it.

Look forward to hearing from you!

User Kim Hoppy was banned and she emailed me wondering why.

Hi!

I registered yesterday and found myself banned after a few hours – reason upspecified and ban will be lifed: Never. (An interesting record, I have to say, and I found it more funny than anything else!) Since I can clear the cache or, at worse, steal someone else’s computer to read the posts, I wasn’t too upset, and my two-cents aren’t that different from what’s already said anyway.

Even still, I was just curious as to what I did that got my wrist slapped. The only thing I can think of is that I ended up on one of those password-protected pages. Since I tend to open several pages up at once and then click them closed as I go through, I didn’t realize it was a different password than my account. I gave it a few tries, in case I mistyped or my notorius sticky-key stuck, and then for the heck of it tried “Thundercats” because you can type anything in those boxes, went “eh,” and tried to figure out which page I didn’t get to check out once I finished reading the pages I had already loaded. And that’s when I noticed and actually read the, please ask for the password.

Anyway, sorry to be a bother!

Sinceres, Kim H.

I already unbanned her. Careful guys!

I think i did this…Kim Hoppy, Manny you have my deepest apologies.

Sorry i am a new moderator and still learning. I’ll be more careful in the future.For sure

Sure, Lordore. Go ahead and take K-O to clean up and maintain

As for banning people that don’t deserve it, it happens. Usually, I look for at least two red flags before I move to ban. Such as weird username + spam links in their sig, or weird email + “man” in their bio section, etc. If I don’t find at least two flags, I leave it and just kinda keep an eye on their activity until they post or add to their profile in a way that puts the mind at ease (ie it’s highly unlikely a spammer will use a tcats avatar).

If anyone else wants a section, please let us know. Otherwise, I guess those of us already maintaining will have to take on more in the near future but I think the smaller we can keep our sections the less spam will make it to the board. So other mods, if you can help please do! Just let us know what part you’re doing so there’s no overlap

Chris here…

Thanks so much to Angie for this excellent suggestion, I think this is a great idea!

I’m a bit wary of taking on checking a particular letter of the alphabet each day because of the workload I already have on the site building pages and page templates, etc. - I’m nervous of taking it on when I already have a full plate of TCL jobs and then end up letting spammers pile up on the letters of the alphabet I’m covering because I have a busy day and the clock ends up beating me!

That said, it’s not fair for me to just sit completely back and watch you guys get over-taxed trying to deal with this. So, I’d like to see if any of the other mods come forward - if not, then maybe I could take on, say, letters X - Z of the alphabet which as a rule would probably be some of the easier sets of letters to tackle since very few names begin with X, Y or Z!

I hope this sounds OK, and just wanted to let you guys know that I’m not trying to cry off helping or anything like that - I still look for spam posts on the forums to go ahead and delete, but you guys are so diligent you aren’t leaving any that I can see! So yeah, just being realistic about the spare time I have, but if no one else comes forward, LMK and I’ll see what I can do!

EDIT: This is actually a very embarrassing question for me to ask, but…how do you ban someone from looking at the A - Z of forum members? I can see how you can access and edit their profile via the vBulletin admin panel, but can’t see anywhere that allows you to ban them?? I’ve just looked at the letter Z and have spotted a couple of spam accounts and wanted to try and delete them but couldn’t see any way to do it…yes, I am an idiot!

Take care…

One problem we are facing is that users who joined in August 2005 are in the member number area of 220, ones that joined in August 2010 are in the area of 1500, ones that joined last month were in the 5000 area, and ones joining today are in the 7200 area. That isn’t a bad thing, but with more registrations, there is the increased risk of accidentally banning a legit person, as Purrsia said.

I mainly focus on the ones who have a wild links in their homepage and/or signature as well as the ones who have funky E-mail providers (*@PaidForumPosters.com). But I must admit, I came close to throwing a ban on two users whose member numbers were under 1500 who set off red flags at first glance. But I figure if someone has been a member for 6+ months and hasn’t come back to post SPAM yet, I don’t need to worry about them.

Lordore, to view members alphabetically, on the User Manager page, click on Search Users, then enter just the first letter you want to search by. When you search, it will list all users who have that letter, but it will be alphabetical, so scroll down and you’ll get all the ones that start with that letter. To avoid researching after each ban you make, right-click on the Ban User link for anyone you find that needs to be banned, then choose either Open in New Window, or Open in New Tab. This will open the banning page, allow you to perform the ban, and once saved, close the tab or window and be back to the same spot in the list you were before.

Merged Post:
I think I can say this on behalf of both Purrsia and Lordore, we fully understand what you mean. As mods, the three of us have one main job: fight spam. The rest of you have all of the behind the scenes stuff of keeping TCL.org going, from updating the site to keeping the forums running.

Maybe if the three of us take 1 extra letter each it may work out better. That would leave 8 letters for others to take. That could work out to be 4 people checking 2 letters each, or 3 people taking 3 each (someone gets a free pass on a letter).

But scanning the user list daily to pro-actively ban spammers before they strike is not a necessity. Most either register, spam within minutes, and get caught by the auto-moderation system, or they register and don’t try to post. Very few manage to post something that get past the auto-moderation system.

Chris here…

Thanks for that tip, it works a treat!

Thanks for being understanding - it’s hard to juggle TCL with my offline life at the best of times, LOL!

Nevertheless, I still feel a bit guilty and so am working backwards from the letter Z at the moment to at least try and catch some of the spam accounts - even if I only do it once, it’s one time that I managed to help! I’ll let you guys know how I get on!

Take care…

Thanks a lot aero i will look to it. I will deal with K-O as Purrsia suggested.

Chris - I totally understand that you, Manny and the others have lots on your plate. It’s no prob! But yeah, if you want to take the end of the alphabet which doesn’t see that much action legit or otherwise, that’s fair enough

Just trying to get an idea of who can help and what they want to take…a no can do is fine, but knowing allows us to sort out how to divvy up the rest and stay on top of it.

I know once I go back to work in the office next week I’ll have less time to do everything else, including stuff here. But it seems like since I got a-e under control I might find only a dozen or less new bad accounts which only takes me maybe 10 minutes to take care of. So even with a full work schedule I’m hoping I can handle that. And hope it doesn’t get worse lol

Chris here…

Well, I went in and managed to prune out a few spam accounts, I’ll try and take a look every day at letters X - Z and see if there’s any I can nab, if anyone wants to help me out that would be awesome!

Angie: You’re a legend, thanks so much for everything you’re doing!

Take care…