Stopping Spam

[GerdW]

Now it reaches out for Breakpoint and Feedback forums!

It's still too early in the morning for Austin/TX...

[dkfire]

Hmm it seems they now also attack more boards, not only the LabVIEW board.

And the amount of users is increasing.

I would probably take the forum offline for at day or so, just to be able to analyze all that data from those users.

[dkfire]

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@Steve Chandler wrote:

But I think this days "attack" on the forum will probably not be stopped by a function like this.

Why wouldn't it be stopped by a function like this?

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The people behind these attacks are not just stopping because one or two users is blocked. They will then make a bot that makes new users in hundred and then you can use all your time on blocking new users.

If they can make one user, they can make 100 or 1 million.

There needs to be done something extra to stop this.

One solution could be that new users are not allowed to make posts within the first 24 hours.

But again, as it has already been said, new users are what NI live of, and if they get a bad experience the first time they try to post on the forum to get help, some might not come back and might drop LabVIEW.

You can set up a lot security to avoid this kind of attack, but the more security you set up the more difficult it would be for normal new users to enter the forum.

The more opstacles you add for new users to enter a forum, the good experience of the forum the new user will get will drop down.

And it is all about the first experience that makes the users come back.

[josborne]

NI needs to hire some seucrity consultants.

[Hornless.Rhino]

~8477 spam at last count and seem to be increasing 1 every few seconds

[danil33]

Is this happening for the first time in this forum?????

[crossrulz]

I logged on this morning to see 8820 new posts!  I was wondering what fun discussions I missed.  Very sad to see nothing but spam.

[SteveChandler]

@dkfire wrote:

The people behind these attacks are not just stopping because one or two users is blocked. They will then make a bot that makes new users in hundred and then you can use all your time on blocking new users.

If they can make one user, they can make 100 or 1 million.

There needs to be done something extra to stop this.

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With the ability of users to block spammers, we could have stopped this particular attack. There are just a few accounts and they are being manually created. One user is called mycanada and another user has the Canadian flag as it's avatar. I think that none of them are using the default avatar.

While we could have used a feature such as what I proposed to stop this particular attack, you are right that blocking a million would not have been possible. But that is a different defense and there are ways to protect against that. Verification by email combined with a captcha is very effective. A spammer can get around that and manually create a few accounts and wreak the havoc we saw over the weekend. But that could have been stopped with some kind of self policing of the forums in place.

I partially like Hornless Rhino's suggestion that all users get the ability to flag a spammer's account which gets blocked at a certain threshold. But I don't think that new users should have that capability. Maybe you automatically get that after a certain level of participation. I can just see someone creating ten accounts for the sole purpose of flagging a regular as a spammer. The moderators can later sort that out but it would still cause some inconvenience.

[RavensFan]

I think the NI web team is on the case now.

The number of new posts and the number of total posts is beginning to drop.

[crossrulz]

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@Ravens Fan wrote:

I think the NI web team is on the case now.

The number of new posts and the number of total posts is beginning to drop.

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The attacks are still coming.  But they do seem to be less frequent and the NI team seems to be deleting a lot faster than SPAM is being added.