Server Help

Trash Talk - Spam

Mine GO BOOM - Mon Feb 14, 2011 1:39 am
Post subject: Spam

If anyone has been reading search engine news recently (like who hasn't?!), you'll know that Google has been getting hit pretty hard with spam. The reason for it is probably to do with their Caffeine engine being able to get spam into the index on high ranking pages very quickly. With that, and the fact we rank so high in Google (see q=server+help), we are getting hit not with automated bots, but actual people hired to copy/paste text into sites.

Fuck. That is harder to deal with because you can't just cheat out some anti-bot things, because these are people paid pennies per post and can actually fill in captchas.

I have recently been busy elsewhere in the world so have had limited time to prune the forums. In a few days I'll be back to my normal schedule and will be able to wipe out spam quicker, and will give a few ideas I have been thinking of a try to prevent the pennies-per-post people from posting in the first place. And probably a "report this post" button too, with automated abilities.

As for the wiki, I will be willing to let more people get admin access to it, as you guys have been doing wonderful updating it with new information when needed, and checking it out often.

Samapico - Mon Feb 14, 2011 6:41 pm
Post subject:

Add some subspace-related questions, like "how many ships are there" or "name this ship" and show a random picture of one of the ships.

Sure, they could find the answer, but I don't think it would be very profitable for them to google the answer first... The image would be especially tricky for them, I suppose.

Cheese - Tue Feb 15, 2011 3:46 pm
Post subject:

Samapico wrote:

Add some subspace-related questions, like "how many ships are there" or "name this ship" and show a random picture of one of the ships.

oh god yes
i think i had thought of this at some point, but then forgot because i probably didnt care at the time

in fact i might go as far as to ask that there be 3 questions
disable guest posting, then add these to the captcha, instant anti-bot + anti-indian

SuSE - Wed Feb 16, 2011 5:48 am
Post subject:

You could also have a bot on SSC somewhere for registration. Should be an annoying but incredibly trivial process for people truly involved in the community. For bonus points you could check the biller info and reject anyone with fewer than FOO hours usage, or no points (never played), etc..

Also I know it could be rationalized as letting spammers win a round, but you could just change the title of the high-ranking pages to "SubSpace Server Help", which would actually be more appropriate anyways.