Spams on the new forum

MarieNoelle

We seem to have an invasion of spam threads on the new forum lately!

ChristianB

Hi @MarieNoelle

We've noticed! On the old forums, we used to manually authorise every new member to keep spammers out. AAT forums were surprisingly popular with spammers; on an average day we'd have over 40 new people sign up for an account and only two or three would be actual AAT members, the rest were known spambots from all over the world.

At the moment, the forums are open for immediate registration. The reason for this is that we wanted to encourage people to sign-up as easily as possible after the upgrade. Eventually, we may get to a point where we have to manually check every new registration again, but for now we're going to do it the old fashioned way.

Stuart and I can both delete these messages and block the perpetrators but with your help we can do it even quicker. You can do this by clicking the 'flag' icon at the bottom of the post, and then selecting 'spam'. This then goes into a queue that Stuart and I administrate.

Example: Let's say for some reason we wanted to treat Stuart as a spammer, you would mark him as such:



Let me know if you have any other questions or thoughts.

Thanks!

Christian

BeccaLouJ9

I noticed this too... I have been flagging away, as has @MarieNoelle....

You seem to be getting rid of them quite quickly though, so well done.

B

ChristianB

I realised after I replied that @MarieNoelle has been flagging them along with yourself! Thanks both, I appreciate the help!

MarieNoelle

I have noticed spammers are increasingly active on the "Recent activity" screen...

StuartW

@MarieNoelle @BeccaLouJ9 FYI I've published a short post regarding how the flagging system works.

Thanks for your efforts, please keep them up!