Fighting with spammers - endless topic

F
Rank

Hi,

Just wanted to share my 2 cents about fighting with spammers on Insided forums.

There more, and more “clever” spam bots, that are trying to post some suspicious links on the forums. They mostly have the same scenario - post 2-3 non-suspicious posts (so it doesn’t look like a bot), then they’re replying their posts after some time (with sus-links hidden - for eg. white text on white background, or linked to a “.” dot etc). The spam filter is not ideal, because it also blocks “good” posts (and they need to be manually approved).

 

I’d suggest to create some easy mechanism to fight spammers.

For eg. new users with less than 10 or 20 posts CANNOT post links, that are not whitelisted in CP (for eg. allow to create links to YT, imgur, vimeo etc but deny others).

Also add another mechanism, to block posts, with less than for eg. 40 characters (but I’d like to see adjustable value), so it’ll filter most “OK”, “i’ve got this..” replies, that spammers mostly using.

9 replies

revathimenon
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Userlevel 7
Badge +4

Thanks for these tips @Fisz 🙌🏼

Where focus goes, energy flows.
F
Rank

Also one more thing. Will be able (in future) to remove posts/ban users from front end (without going to CP)?

leo-inspired
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Userlevel 3
Badge +1

Hey @Fisz, very sorry to hear you’ve been dealing with spammers lately.

If you create a support ticket, we can block email domains from signing up to your community. Does that help you?

 

Fighting spammers is becoming increasingly difficult, so thank you for sharing this idea. I do agree we could create some sorts of adjustable mechanisms so admins could manage this by themselves.

 

One thing that has been really annoying lately are spammers/bots sending private messages. Unfortunately it’s not possible to customize which user can send private messages at the moment but this is already on the talks and should be a new feature soon.

 

Regarding topics/posts, we definitely need to think of new ways to address this; as you mentioned, limiting posting links to new users would be a great place to start. I'll discuss this with our product team to see if it's feasible.

 

Our spam filter (Akismet) is pretty smart however, we haven’t had many complaints about it recently. The spam filter learns as you provide it with more information. In particular, we recommend that you frequently check the spam filter in Control and mark posts as ‘not spam’ when the spam filter is mistakenly marked as spam (false positives). You should also mark posts as spam when the spam filter misses a genuine spam post (false negative).

Lauro Lana | Customer Support Engineer | Gainsight Customer Communities
F
Rank

Hi @leo-inspired - blocking e-mail domains is NOT an option, unless you want to block 80% legit users.

Most of the spambots are using free e-mail services on gmail / outlook saw few on icloud etc. Also it’s very easy to spoof the e-mail domain.

I think, that blocking ability to post links for new users will drastically decrease amount of spam on forums.

Also spam filters are not working, when someone will link it to character like “.” (dot) or to emoji, which is not very visible to the user, but that’s how they hiding the suspicious/dangerous links.

leo-inspired
Rank
Userlevel 3
Badge +1

I see your point on this one as well @Fisz - could you maybe create an idea with the title “Fighting spammers” (or something similar) and add your suggestions there? I’m sure other users will give their input as well as this is something quite important to address for any community.

Lauro Lana | Customer Support Engineer | Gainsight Customer Communities
F
Rank

I see your point on this one as well @Fisz - could you maybe create an idea with the title “Fighting spammers” (or something similar) and add your suggestions there? I’m sure other users will give their input as well as this is something quite important to address for any community.

The problem is, that I cannot access Ideas (probably insufficient privileges) - any possibility to fix this for me?

I also cannot access my older topics, which were converted to ideas.

olimarrio
Rank
Userlevel 4
Badge +4

Hey @Fisz 👋,

I’ve just given you access to our Ideation module. Let me know if you have any trouble accessing still!

F
Rank

Hey @Fisz ?,

I’ve just given you access to our Ideation module. Let me know if you have any trouble accessing still!

Thank you.

I’ve posted this as an Idea:

 

DannyPancratz
Rank
Userlevel 6
Badge +7

Just a kernel of an idea here, it’s not fully thought out… I’m lucky not to have this problem as our forums are private and our SSO keeps spammers out. 

Perhaps there’s a way to automate alerts and/or the flagging of suspicious posts via webhooks and/or Zapier. 

  • New post webhook or zapier trigger
    • The payload gives the html of the content, so maybe there’s a pattern that could be filtered for the alert
  • Alert to staff via slack/Teams/email/whatever.. and/or
  • API action to report the post… and/or
  • API action to trash the post (could always be restored)

OR you can actually implement moderator oversight for the scenario you outline above: users with fewer than X posts haven’t earned the trust yet. 

While you can’t limit them from posting links (that i know of), you could monitor their activity and catch spammers more quickly

  • New post webhook or zapier trigger
  • Filter on the content itself, does it include a link? If yes, continue
  • API call to look up the user who posted it
  • Filter for # of posts and other criteria like reg date (assuming spammers are likely newer users)
  • Alerts to staff to monitor the posts

 

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