How to hinder ongoing spamming?

Ongoing spamming from

• [e-mail] 166 question asked, some of which I closed (+another 21 in the last 20 minutes) (and now the number has increased to 399)
• arjun 47 question asked, which I closed

There must be a better way to delete these questions.

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2015-01-07 I just closed a dozen or two identical spams.

(((लव वशीकरण))) [phone] Love Spells To Get Your Ex Back in uk usa use us

Asked by baba ji 3 minutes ago

Latest activity Closed by per isakson less than a minute ago

[per isakson]

Good to see you spotted this spammer.

[Star Strider]

I intercepted a few of those a week or so ago and reported them to Randi Souza. Three different accounts, one new account each night. Then they stopped for a while. I thought maybe the spammer had gotten a life (finally)!

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

The 2 spam bots below assaulted the forum last night with over 1200 spams - a new record I think:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5497328-jib-ji
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5497771-sk-sharma

I spent an hour last night deleting them but just couldn't keep up and woke up this morning to over a thousand spams. If they're not going to give trusted editors the ability to suspend accounts like that then I think they should at least require some kind of captcha for accounts with less than 20 reputation points to limit the ability of bots like these to do what essentially is a denial of service attack on the site. With page after page of questions being nothing but spam, we can't find legitimate posts. It's not fair to the legitimate posters and it's annoying to us who want to help them. If someone has proven themselves and has some minimal number of reputation points (like 10 or 20) then the captcha should not be required. I've never seen a spammer with more than about 2 or 4 reputation points (typically when they accept each other's spams). Steve Eddins has a crude captcha on his blog but it seems to work.

So, in summary I think the ability for trusted editors to suspend/disable accounts would be best, followed by captchas for low-reputation accounts.

[Stephen23]

They are back with a vengeance today. Ouch, it is almost impossible to browse the forum.

I also thought about how to prevent this, and came up with a very similar idea to Image Analyst: how about preventing users with less than 20 reputation points from submitting hyperlinks and URL's (perhaps with a warning?)

[Joseph Cheng]

Disabling the ability for hyperlinks maybe more harmful for new students or users who link to other answer submissions or pertinent sites. I do not know what the moderators do to counter the spam, but wouldn't giving them the ability to temporarily ban and alert other moderators for which (2+) moderators would have to ban to delete the account? Temporary ban would hide all their submissions from the general public.

Also could we not utilize CODY to ask the user to perform one of CODY's simplest problems?

[Image Analyst]

I deleted about 10 spams that made it past the filters into the forum this morning.

The Mathworks did put in one fix - I guess the easiest for them. Now spammers are limited to 10 posts per day (or some time period). We have discussed putting in things like captchas for low reputation points users, like spammers, but it's not there yet I don't think. Conversely sometimes even I get flagged as potential spam sometimes, so I told them that people with reputation more than 50 or so should not be flagged as potential spam.

[Walter Roberson]

The 10 post limit is not working then. I have cleaned up at least 40 posts by the same person, with at least 30 of them made within a few minutes time span.

[Image Analyst]

Click on their name to see how many posts they have made. I have not seen anyone with more than 10 in the last few months, though I have seen accounts that have the same name but a different account ID number . So they could be making up 10 accounts all with the same name since the name is not required to be unique.

Answer 2

[Star Strider]

All of the ones I deleted last night (I lost track after the first 100) involved ‘astrology’. That ‘jib ji’ bot was posting faster than I could delete them. It was late, I was tired, and after the deluge of more than 100 ‘Questions’ in about 30 minutes, I just gave up and went to bed.

I was thinking about this, and would suggest that — if not absolutely blocked — anything with ‘astrology’ in the message to be limited to one post every 10 or 15 minutes from the same account. I’ve never seen a legitimate post here involving ‘astrology’, so perhaps blocking them entirely (and related terms such as ‘vedic’, ‘mantra’ and such) would be appropriate. None of those terms would legitimately be in a MATLAB question.

The ‘watch-this-movie-for-free’ posts, while I would like to see them blocked entirely, are of sufficiently low frequency to keep up with. Checking the ‘Flagged Content’ list occasionally helps find the ones others have discovered.