Mahz

Massive Spambot invasion 4/16/2016

@Mahz Do you think there is a way to flag a User if they post an x amount of replies within y time? Given the rate at which they post, it should assist in figuring out which are spambots and which are not?

@VKAllen

Yeah, I'm building a new view on the mod dashboard that just shows a stream of the first post by each new user with the "nuke account" button right there. It would defeat the spammers were currently have.

Massive Spambot invasion 4/16/2016

Sorry yall've gotta put up with the spam. Especially the mods that have to use the crappy modkit. :(

If only the UK kitchen appliance spammers were more aggressive, I would have built
a better modkit sooner.

Massive Spambot invasion 4/16/2016

I'm still working on the problem, but I wasn't able to allocate enough time to finish my objectives this weekend so it's going to spill into the work week.

My main objective is to make it easier for mods to nuke spam accounts. We used to have this feature, but I'm reimplementing the "Nuke Account" button that lets us (reversibly) annihilate accounts and all their topics/posts/PMs in one click.

My other objective is to slow down the rate at which spammers can pollute the forum. I'll start with a Recaptcha per topic/post, but ideally new (untrusted) accounts will have a rate-limit that gets relaxed as they become trusted.

That combo makes it annoying for spammers to spam while making it trivial for mods to undo the spammers' work, with little impact on existing members. As I mentioned earlier, there are more robust ideas I've been considering, but they take much more dev work and can be built on top of the two approaches above.

It's mostly done, but I'm currently testing my progress so far.

Massive Spambot invasion 4/16/2016

My question is: Who made Hank a mod?

@Myyt

Massive Spambot invasion 4/16/2016

I'm booting up the Guild development environment on my computer to get the first patch out the door.

I have a lot of spam-prevention ideas, but the most robust ones require the most development time. Today I'll be focusing on the simplest and fastest-to-implement solutions to slow down the assault and buy time for the more robust solutions.

Massive Spambot invasion 4/16/2016

Thanks, I'll take a look when I get to work in a bit, survey the damage, and figure out how I want to fix it and implement a real anti-spambot solution finally.

The Great Spambot War has begun!

Gonna grab some breakfast to fuel my body, mind, spirit and prepare for my first move.

Mahz's Dev Journal

Looks like my caching system hit a rare race-condition where the list of forum categories returned "null" instead of a list. The rest of the code expects a list, so some pages of the forum (namely the homepage) would throw an error.

It should be resolved for now.

I will be making some time soon to catch up in my various guild duties. bbl

I'm back after...many years!

@MadamMina

>I used to be Snozzberry4947 on this site

I remember that username!