Add more simple spam filters
2 views (last 30 days)
Show older comments
Dear MATLAB answers team,
What about rejecting all new threads, which contain Korean characters and the typical term "seven seven dot" which appear in the title? I'm aware that this request is naive and spammers will find another gap. But at least the current flood would be stopped.
The editors need 4 mouse clicks to report a message as spam and delete it. Then it takes about 15 seconds until this procedure is ready in my browser. Afterwards a new view on the main page of the forum appears, such that I have to click a 5th time to close it also.
It would be more efficient if the opinion of 2 editors is enough to exclude a specific user from posting temporarily until an admin decides how this person is treated.
Unfortunately the forum is not usable at the moment.
5 Comments
Star Strider
on 26 Mar 2015
That’s a usual tactic to keep one deleted account from interfering with ongoing spamming. However, being able to deactivate an account to prevent further posting from it would eventually cover all accounts posting spam. I suspect it would become so inconvenient to keep setting up new accounts that the spamming would stop.
Account deactivation would be a separate privilege. It could be revoked by Randy and friends if abused, but I doubt it would. I’ve never seen any evidence of abuse of any other privilege.
Accepted Answer
Image Analyst
on 26 Mar 2015
In my opinion, captchas should only be required for initial account registration. If I can possibly avoid it with better spam filters, then I don't want to have captchas imposed on me. I post so much that it would be burdensome/punishing on me. Why should I have to be punished because of the spammers? Only force captchas on me if there is no way to have reliable spam filters. I know there are many spam authors now, much more than before, so I don't know if they have some automated account creation bot. It's been so long I don't recall if there is a captcha for account creation or not. If not there should be. I don't mind doing it once but I don't want to deal with captchas 300 times per month.
I agree that having editors disable/suspend accounts for review by Randy, John, or Kevin is a good solution. And if they have captchas there would be a small, reasonable number that we editors could handle. It also might be good if we could also add our own spam filter, at least until Randy reviews it, where we can have it automatically filter out all message with a certain term (web site) in it.
I think in the spam attack, a day ago, they lowered the spam threshold so much it pulled a few hundred legitimate messages (mostly old ones) into the spam quarantine. Those messages eventually disappeared so I don't know if they got deleted or put back.
I wrote a bot to delete spam from the quarantine but since it takes about 15 seconds per spam, it's not workable if there are thousands in there. I know Randy and crew have a way of mass deleting them, instead of one at a time like we need to do. I'd like that power to help.
The daily limit on new accounts is also a good idea. Or perhaps just a captcha on questions, answers, and comments posted by new accounts, but not by old accounts or accounts with more than, say, 10 reputation points.
4 Comments
David
on 26 Mar 2015
This spam attack exploited a new vector that our filters missed, obviously. We are taking steps to update our spam filter to prevent similar deluges. In addition, we are assessing options in other areas of the site including account creation. As Adam points out above, these spam messages came from hundreds of valid accounts that effected most of the MATLAB Central applications.
This is a good discussion and is helping to inform our decisions for catching and preventing spam in the future.
John D'Errico
on 12 Apr 2015
Higher reputation could be used to avoid needing captchas for posting, but even there, it would be a disincentive for people to answer or post. I'd rather not see that.
More Answers (7)
Chad Greene
on 26 Mar 2015
How about anyone with >50 reputation points can put questions into quarantine and anyone with >500 points can quarantine users? Those values might need to be adjusted, but given how committed someone needs to be to accrue points on this forum, the thresholds could probably be quite low.
0 Comments
Guillaume
on 13 Apr 2015
A more effective spam filter is certainly required as the forum is completely flooded this morning. Over 400 spam posts, some of which are even marked as having an accepted answer by the OP while having no answer.
As it is, the forum is unusable.
0 Comments
per isakson
on 18 Jun 2016
Edited: per isakson
on 20 Jun 2016
I've deleted several spams over the last couple of days. Most (all?) of them contained a body text, which was copied from a legal question. Example:
 
- Wouldn't it be possible to let med block the sender for a day?
- They all contained a telephone(?) number in the title. No legal question does that.
 
A day later: Now I've deleted another few chunks of spams of the same kind. Please, give me a feature that deletes all spams from a specific spammer and requires only three clicks.
14 Comments
per isakson
on 12 Jul 2016
Please,
- automatically delete all post with a phone number in the title.
- a button to delete all post from a spammer
Jan
on 12 Apr 2015
Edited: Jan
on 12 Apr 2015
13 Comments
Image Analyst
on 14 Apr 2015
It's gone now. What what it? I saw one where the spam was all in a scanned image - a photo - in Urdu language.
Walter Roberson
on 21 May 2015
The current tactic of the postings I see, is that they grab the first few lines of a recent posting, and use that as the body of a Question, with the "guru" / "black magic" spam payload in the question title.
0 Comments
Walter Roberson
on 21 May 2015
My experience recently is that each message I click on "Yes this IS spam" in the quarantine, requires 16 to 19 seconds to delete, and some seconds after that to retrieve the current list of Questions and paint that. I use the technique of launch-a-tab-per-message that others mention previously. If I am processing multiple deletes in this manner, then a fraction between 1/4 and 2/3 of the deletions fail, giving a "Something went wrong" page, in which case the postings remain in the list undeleted. The behaviour is much the same for postings that did not make it into the quarantine and which I am hitting Delete and ticking Flag as Spam on.
Because the failure risk seems to rise the more deletions I am processing at the same time (speculation: obtaining a lock on a resource is timing out), there is an effective limit on how many of these tabs I can be running simultaneously, pretty much having to wait until the last of them finishes deletion until I can fire off a new batch, to keep the simultaneous actions down to the point the system can handle.
0 Comments
See Also
Categories
Find more on Language Support in Help Center and File Exchange
Community Treasure Hunt
Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!
Start Hunting!