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fyi- New Spam Tools Installed...

Sean

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Hi All,

We got hit with some child porn spam today. What more can be said than this sort of thing is violently disturbing. I have now added two more spam fighting tools in hopes this never happens again.

1. Akismet service. This is a subscription service that scans the posts of new members for a variety of spam/porn keywords and locks the accounts down. It also scans new material against some known spam that already exists.

2. No links in posts allowed until a user makes 5 posts. Often spammers or bots signup and immediately post spam or porn links.

With these new tools combined with our other tools we should be able to reduce most spam.

Thanks,
Sean
 

Rick A

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God Bless you, Sean.
 

David A. Goldfarb

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Looks good, Sean. I noticed that when we delete spam now, we also report it to our anti-spam service, so let's hope this makes a dent and catches more of it before the moderators have to deal with it.
 

Sirius Glass

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Thanks Sean, but for the sake of information security, in the future consider stating that you had added a new capability but do not disclose the product or method of blocking spam.

Steve
 

David A. Goldfarb

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Just confirming that the new measures are working. Spam is coming in and is flagged before becoming visible on the site, so that the moderators can either approve the post, if it's a false positive, or delete it along with any other posts by the same user and ban the spammer before their posts are even seen by APUG users.
 

lxdude

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Great job!
 

David A. Goldfarb

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Interesting piece in the New York Times about how spam could be greatly reduced, if the credit card companies could block the merchant accounts of the spammers, 95% of which go through three banks. If the spammers tried to dodge these efforts, it would take longer for them to set up new accounts than it would to shut them down as soon as they were identified as spam.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/technology/20spam.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=spam&st=cse
 
OP
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Sean

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I made a few tweaks so will probably revert back to the way it was. It seems to block 1 out of 20 legit people from registering and I then have to set them up manually, but if it's letting a lot of spammers through then it's not worth the new setting. Thanks for the heads up
 
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