Novel Idea To Fight Spam

Novel Idea To Fight Spam

Perhaps Opera's been going about it the wrong way. New members could be placed in robots.txt disallow for 3 months - and if nobody has reported them as a possible real person in that time, the account gets deleted.

As it stands at the moment, only 1/20 of the new US members look remotely real. Absurd names, all advertising a product or service.

There comes a time, follow or no follow, when Google will refuse to index my.opera at all.

Originally posted by 53north:

New members could be placed in robots.txt disallow for 3 months - and if nobody has reported them as a possible real person in that time, the account gets deleted.

Some members use their accounts for totally private purposes eg private diary. private albums, private Unite file sharing(!). Some use my.opera.com account for myopera.com mail only. Who or what mechanism would "reports" them as real persons?

Originally posted by castus2:

whats to be done?

Make it much more difficult for them (new members) to sign up, Limit what they can post for the first few posts, And/Or have their account under review or mod approval for the first month or so ?.

Anyone else have any more or better ideas ?

There seems to be a lot of spammers from New Zealand:

http://my.opera.com/community/members/location/new_zealand

Plenty from Norway (allegedly) too: http://my.opera.com/community/members/location/norway but posts are in English promoting US *.com sites.

This one is from UK: http://my.opera.com/contentwritings/about/

The massage tables spammer has been working hard — probably has members for every country:

Armenia

Originally posted by LinuxMint7:

Limit what they can post for the first few posts, And/Or have their account under review or mod approval for the first month or so ?.

I suggested it earlier, but Steve (sgunhouse) says it will mean more work for the moderators.

8 million members reached September 27th 2011

10 million members reached on 18th June 2012.

That's more then 2m new members in less than 9 months. No manual system could cope with that number of new members. That's about 8,000 a day!

Must be something wrong with the math there, Tamil said it was just 4313 in the last month. Okay, looks like last year we had several months over 8000, but we seem to have dropped off since then. Still, 4000 new members a day is still pretty high ... and more than I'd want to have to deal with.

I suggested this long ago, but nothing really came of it: Replace the captchas needed to register or post on forums/blogs/etc. with questions people must answer to proceed. This will break all spam bots and for those bots that are reprogrammed to bypass a question, staff could switch the question and break all the bots again.

The questions wouldn't do anything about human spammers (IP ban hammers can fix that though), but the questions will stop the bots on My Opera.

Yeah, Because it's too damn easy to sign-up, And it shouldn't be.

Charge people $0.10 via paypal to create a blog account.
Just think if you had started doing this 10 years ago...

Originally posted by 53north:

Perhaps Opera's been going about it the wrong way. New members could be placed in robots.txt disallow for 3 months - and if nobody has reported them as a possible real person in that time, the account gets deleted.

Thank you for your suggestion! While this is a great idea, it would be hard to maintain and unfortunately not be optimal in length.

robots.txt is basically a list of URLs that should not be indexed, and if we say we get, for the sake of round numbers, 50.000 new accounts per week, it would at any given time have about 600.000 entries listed. If we further say that each line has about 15 characters in average, we'd have roughly 0.1 kilobytes worth of data per line, which would total out at about 60.000 kilobytes, or just under 60 megabytes. This would be an enormous amount of data to serve for every single Google bot request!

We are working hard to fight spam, but right now we are currently stretched thin on resources due to vacations, and as such there might be more than normal slipping through as it might take time to. If you feel there's something that should have our attention, please feel free to contact me directly!

Hi Robert. Found this suggestion by animefuckhead at another topic. Seems a novel and a lot less labour intensive idea than the OPs.

Originally posted by animefuckhead:

I found that the best way to completely stop any spambots from appearing, is instead of using captcha's, buttons, and other commonly known methods of trying to stop spambots, try something new, unorthodox, that spambots are completely NOT built for, for example, while captchas and human questions require text input, shift it up the way I did at forkheads (no links because totally NSFanyone) is to create a drag and drop menu, that you have to order in the correct way to get past, or something else entirely

but whatever you do, using captchas and text answers wont work forever because bots are already being more and more advanced in getting past them

Crowdsource it. Give longstanding members (2 years or more) and known to be humans (judged by the production of natural forum posts, blogs, or photo albums) a license to delete spammers. To reduce the risk of abuse, actual deletion would occur only if 3 or more of these "volunteer sherifs" report some user as a spammer. As a further safeguard, the deleted user would have the opportunity to appeal to Opera staff (logging in after deletion would automatically produce a form for this).

Originally posted by mimi_s_mum:

Hi Robert. Found this" target="_blank">http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?id=12904772]this suggestion by animefuckhead at another topic. Seems a novel and a lot less labour intensive idea than the OPs.

Originally posted by animefuckhead:

I found that the best way to completely stop any spambots from appearing, is instead of using captcha's, buttons, and other commonly known methods of trying to stop spambots, try something new, unorthodox, that spambots are completely NOT built for, for example, while captchas and human questions require text input, shift it up the way I did at forkheads (no links because totally NSFanyone) is to create a drag and drop menu, that you have to order in the correct way to get past, or something else entirely

but whatever you do, using captchas and text answers wont work forever because bots are already being more and more advanced in getting past them

Thanks! It's a good suggestion, but it wouldn't work for people using phones without touch screen, which are a significant portion of the site's visits. :/

Originally posted by Ruohtula:

Crowdsource it. Give longstanding members (2 years or more) and known to be humans (judged by the production of natural forum posts, blogs, or photo albums) a license to delete spammers. To reduce the risk of abuse, actual deletion would occur only if 3 or more of these "volunteer sherifs" report some user as a spammer. As a further safeguard, the deleted user would have the opportunity to appeal to Opera staff (logging in after deletion would automatically produce a form for this).

We have actually done something like this, and it did help. I'll bring forth the idea about making it easier to appeal. Thanks for the suggestion!

I'd love to put my name forward to be a 'Volunteer Sheriff'.

I've lost count of the amount of Spammers i have reported in the relatively short time i have
been signed up here.

Though i am possibly on here more than most members here.

Pick me.

Originally posted by Ruohtula:

Give longstanding members ... a license to delete spammers.

I have proposed a somewhat similar measure before

Originally posted by mimi_s_mum:

Please consider appointing several "Community monitors" who has the power to temporarily freeze user account of spammers but nothing more. When temporary freeze is in place, the user's forum comments are hidden but their own blog & photo album contents are still retained and open to access, though the user cannot post a new content including forum posts. ..., a moderator is to review the temporary freeze and decide make the final decision either to formally ban the account or not.

And another community driven measure, without a need for a special agent or sheriff

Originally posted by mimi_s_mum:

Please implement a "Report" trigger. When a new user is reported for spamming a certain number, the account is temporarily banned and their forum posts hidden until reviewed by a moderator. This would be especially effective to fight the spammers who target the time/day when Opera staff is not active, like right now.

Originally posted by LinuxMint7:

I'd love to put my name forward to be a 'Volunteer Sheriff'

Good on ya, Mint!

For the record ... around here volunteers that help the sheriff are called the sheriff's auxiliary (or also sometimes called his "posse", but that has some connotations that we might wish to avoid).

Originally posted by sgunhouse:

"posse", but that has some connotations that we might wish to avoid

What is it?

Whatever a new measure the devs put in, I would like to see reported spammers dealt with a lot faster than currently are. Sometimes they sit there for hours, especially in this Feedback ... subforum. There's one forum spammer right now, probably one of the regulars, posting multiple spams. I've reported him but he is still there posting more. Seems all sheriffs and their auxiliaries are living on the wrong side of the planet already in bed ...

I'm here.

I'd love to click that ban button.

But only where appropriate, Obviously

Mint the sheriff!

Originally posted by mimi_s_mum:

Mint the sheriff!

But i did not mint the deputy.

Originally posted by mimi_s_mum:

Whatever a new measure the devs put in, I would like to see reported spammers dealt with a lot faster than currently are. Sometimes they sit there for hours, especially in this Feedback ... subforum. There's one forum spammer right now, probably one of the regulars, posting multiple spams.

Seems happening every weekend (It's 10AM Saturday morning for me )

The situation has changed very little. Another Saturday morning (for me) and the forum board is flooded with spams, sitting there hours after reported.

We really need a simple mechanism to temporarily hide topics by a new member once one of his/her topics is reported as spam (but not other forum rule violation), until a moderator reviews them.

Perhaps some snippets of site code that require 2 or 3 separate reports of spam abuse from different members, then the offending topic or post automatically would go to a hidden "posting jail" until reviewed by a mod? Obviously, that code would have to store some kind of complaining-member ID to assure separate complaints (but which could also function to provide feedback paths for corrective action if the complaining process itself was abused) and would have to provide for the jail itself... but it doesn't seem that it should be all that complicated.

Originally posted by blackbird71:

Perhaps some snippets of site code that require 2 or 3 separate reports of spam abuse from different members, then the offending topic or post automatically would go to a hidden "posting jail" until reviewed by a mod?

I proposed that system before. But since then the community developers implemented a change. Now once a spam is reported, further reporting is blocked under current system, which makes such a solution unworkable. That's why I made the above new proposal.

Regarding the robots.txt, Google recognises the * wildcard, or if you coded a suffix or prefix to the url of new blogs you could keep the whole batch out of google (e.g. my.opera.com/idiot/blog-new , with my.opera.com/*/blog-new in robots.txt....1 line of code.


Also, Анон, or Anon is very prominent in Google results, nofollowing or robots.txt or noindexing /comments might give the Opera domain a boost in results (after the initial dip for lost content).