DVD Nonesense

OK, it's getting out of hand.  I don't care what you have to do to solve the problem, but if the DVD thievery posts aren't curtailed soon, you're going to start losing your audience.  Nearly 25% of all posts seem to be spam these days.

And just so I'm not a whiner with no input... I'd be happy with a Captcha system, since I'm sure these posts are coming from bots.

Duncan has already said that there is evidence that these posts are in fact not coming from bots.

Captcha system = waste of time.

boondox said:

Captcha system = waste of time.

Fine, what ever.  I don't really care what system is used (though stating captcha is a waste of time is pointless).  The spam just has to end.  It's out of control, and WILL cost C9 viewers, if left to continue as currently is.

Why don't they just bring back the spam button.

DVD Thievery? thats a bit of ignorant opinion to lay onto software that just converts an aging slow and useless encrypted mpeg2 video stream to something more appropriate and useful for ones use. Afteral anyone using it most likely owns the DVD right?

Charles said:

I have been deleting these posts and banning the users posting them. Sorry if I'm not keeping up. Sure would be good if we enabled a way for Niners to help police this. I'll talk to Duncan.
C

What would be really cool is if there were some way of utilising Microsoft's existing investment in spam detection on forums.  It'd be pretty amazing if you could submit all posts from newcomers to a web service somewhere, with some metadata (IP address, etc.) and have it reply with a spam confidence level that you could then use to decide if a posting should be shown or hidden by default.

warren said:

Charles said:

*snip*

What would be really cool is if there were some way of utilising Microsoft's existing investment in spam detection on forums.  It'd be pretty amazing if you could submit all posts from newcomers to a web service somewhere, with some metadata (IP address, etc.) and have it reply with a spam confidence level that you could then use to decide if a posting should be shown or hidden by default.

Except that Microsoft's spam detection effort has gone towards email (and doesn't work all that well, if the amount of garbage I see in my Hotmail account is any indication).

If I were them, I'd plug into Akismet (which is most commonly used to block spam on Wordpress blogs, but is a web service and therefore can be adapted to work with forums or with other blog software).

Charles said:

I have been deleting these posts and banning the users posting them. Sorry if I'm not keeping up. Sure would be good if we enabled a way for Niners to help police this. I'll talk to Duncan.
C

Perheps we can have some keyword badlisting system?

Just make sure you got interface to expose the banned keyword, and a thread for people to protest about the badlisted words. (Just in case someone would protest the possibility of abusing it.)

Make sure you badlist the substring from the URLs only to minimize the disturbance to legitimate posts. (I think they'd need to link back to their website in order to do any good for them... and that implies we'll also need to block link redirection websites like TinyUrl too.)

 

CannotResolveSymbol said:

warren said:

*snip*

Except that Microsoft's spam detection effort has gone towards email (and doesn't work all that well, if the amount of garbage I see in my Hotmail account is any indication).

If I were them, I'd plug into Akismet (which is most commonly used to block spam on Wordpress blogs, but is a web service and therefore can be adapted to work with forums or with other blog software).

I would second that.

I have a wordpress weblog, and have yet to be infiltrated by spam using Akismet.

The key feature you need to deal with is deleting/isolating any post that has more than 1 or 2 links in it.  That will get pretty much all your video spam.