What are they? Where do they come from? Are they serving some purpose? Can they be stopped? Willie
Do you mean threads with titles like " excited to see that she had recently ", or " Curved screens dont just look elegant " ? They contain spam links. There was one earlier today, that CM left on the forum, but locked, after having edited the spam out of it. The title is " been quite a traumatic event ", and it had one of our members reply to it. CM left a post asking that nobody reply to those threads. We'd prefer that nobody does that, because sometimes when we remove the spam, the reply gets left behind, and with no context to it, it looks like nonsense too. As to their purpose and whether they can be stopped? :Banghead :bash Their purpose is to make the Mods constantly on the alert for more of them. (Or so it seems.) If we knew a way to stop them, we'd have done so already. Steve is working on an change to the software that might help. Let's hope. And if anybody doesn't know already, if you mouse over the title of a thread, you get a glimpse of the first few lines of the contents. DON'T EVEN BOTHER TO READ THE THREAD. The only personal satisfaction I get from this whole ordeal is seeing that when I remove one it's had zero views, and it's been a waste of the spammer's time at least equal to the waste of the Moderators' time.
They are spam. They come from South Asia mostly. They serve some purpose to the spammers, either links, or page views ow who knows what? Only you can prevent nonsense threads, Do NOT click on them, hover the cursor over any suspicious thread and if it doesn't make sense, don't click. Don't reply. Somebody said don't even bother flagging them, because they're so obvious, and they usually come together in batches.
And in the time it took for me to type the reply above, a new one registered and posted. Literally the last thing I did before posting that reply was to check the memberlist and see if there were any suspicious characters arriving. And thanks, Delmer, for taking the time to help out there. It feels good to know that the message is getting through. I had posted that my personal preference is that nobody bother to report them. See, the way it works is, that when a member "reports" a post, the whole staff gets an email, subject: "Reported post from Heavy Equipment Forums." In that email is a link to the offending post, but we have to follow the link the see what it's about. What I'm worried about is that if somebody reports something important, like a real flame war over the merits of two competing brands of iron, that it'll go unnoticed because our email boxes are full of reported nonsense spam posts. They do tend to stand out from the stuff that makes sense. Certainly, if anybody sees one that's been around for a day or more, or maybe a good old violation of our advertising rules, you can figure that we overlooked that one, and reporting it would be helpful. On edit: I ain't replying here no more. Every time I get finished, there's another one! So everybody can appreciate the magnitude of the problem, I just checked. We had a thread discussing this about a month ago. At that time, we'd removed around 417 spam posts since the beginning of the year. In just one month, we're now up to 680 some...
Unfortunately i think they've found HEF to be a soft target and it'll only get worse until they get convinced it's not worth the effort.
I'll echo what digger stated. When I get home at the end of the day my email has a long list of reported posts about the "nonsense" posts that we've been dealing with for some time. I've learned to not even check them because it chews up so much of my time. Instead, I log in to HEF and go through the "new posts" list looking for the familiar "nonsense" titles and deal with them immediately if I run across one. And I can ga-ron-tee the other mods are doing the same, we are constantly refreshing the page and scrolling trough the new posts looking for the nonsense thread titles, that's what we do. While other members are going about their business here we are constantly looking for the stuff that doesn't belong here. And we do it happily, no complaints on my end, I just enjoy HEF so much the little effort I put into keeping it what it is, well, it's a labor of love for me.
Digger and willie, thanks for explaining things from your end. I hope other members read this and don't report one until it's a couple of days old so it will relieve you mods of excess E-mail. Mike
Currently we have removed 686 "nonsense threads". Like Digger and Willie have stated it's a constant battle that we take seriously, I lost count of the threads removed this afternoon. We see the spam ramp up on the weekends due to sporting events although we also get movie spam as well. As far as HEF being a "soft target", these spammers are hitting all the big Forums and it's become a pestering issue for Forums across the net.
I cant understand what the spammers can gain from those messages but thanks for getting rid of them
I wasn't trying to say HEF was unique in this predicament, just that as a high traffic forum it is an easy way to post garbage and get click-throughs. Just so you guys know, I fully believe this is the best moderated forum i've every been involved with.
How about some quiz questions that only a moderately skilled Heavy Equipment Person would know. That way if some real mechanic has a problem they could post quickly. If you fail those you would not be notified you failed but just quietly directed to explain oneself and wait for mod approval. Then it wouldn't be hard on people who don't speak much English or from faraway lands. Just a thought.
Anyone using a phone (and the full site, I don't prefer the mobile version) can click on the member name of a suspicious thread and see the profile and the first line of the post. BTW, thanks to all you mods for keeping after it.
Busy this morning.
One of the other forums that I hang around in, is run by a single person. He was being run into the ground by the spammers so he has it set up now so that his site will not accept anything that comes from servers in certain countries, ie, China. It is a bit of an Orwellian solution, banning whole countries, but he was being hammered, site was down, all kinds of problems. Now he can manage it. His site is a place where people traveling the world can post their journals. The solution does create a problem for those people who travel to the banned countries. But since he has gone this route, his site has not been spammed or hacked for some time. I really like HEF, one off my favorite spots to go. I don't post that much, but I go here every day and have a read to see what is happening. I thought that I was doing the Mod's a favor by reporting possible spam, I will quit doing that. Thanks to all the Mod's for their time and effort to keep this great site up and running.
The "report post" button is there for the members of HEF help us moderators "take out the trash". The way it works well, obviously we (mods) can't practically view every post that is made at HEF, but at any given time there can be a hundred members logged on pretty much scanning the plethora of posts here. The old school spammers will make a post buried deep in a thread, some thread by a member looking for aftermarket parts for his rock crusher, that's when a China spammer will make a post "hey, buy from me, I sell you crusher equipments parts". Those are the posts that slip by the mods with ease, and if a member runs across one, hit the report post button so we can "take out the trash". That's not the case with the nonsense title threads. Unlike being buried in an existing thread, these spam posts are right up front on the board with obvious thread titles that raise the red flag, heck, might as well have a flashing beacon on them. It sooooooo easy for us to spot them and bring out the ban gun immediately. That's the one's that it's really not necessary for members to report, they fall in our lap and call us momma. But with the traditional spam, spamming existing threads, help from the members is appreciated. :drinkup
Well, I read this thread right after reporting one of these nonsense posts and feeling good about doing it. Sorry. Had I read this thread first, I would have left it be. Many thanks to all of the mods that help make HEF the fine place that it is.
....talked to Vicki Wu of Zombie Crushers China Ltd. (She not one of them ) Edited to remove content that was way over the line as far as sexual double entendre goes. Let's not lower the standards that have made this forum as nice a place as it is.
Don't fret about it JDO, for many years the "report post" button has worked exactly as it was intended to, to help the mods, it's these $treaming spammers and them starting the nonsense titled threads that has changed the way we've been doing things for years, we all have to adapt to changes like this and roll with it. :drinkup
Thanks for clearing that up willie59 . Like you stated the recent spammers are pretty obvious . Don't know what the answer is ? Longer vetting process in becoming a member ? Buddy & I was figuring it would finally get so bad with spam & hacking we would just un plug it all & go back to AM radio . Steve could start a call in AM radio HEF station with call screeners from 7 to 10 PM . And tonight's topic is " in field repair work " . " lets hear from you mobile wrench benders " . Call in at ......................
Yes, that's an option, but one thing we don't want to do is make it more cumbersome for genuine real people to become new members at HEF as they would have no clue as to why we are making them jump through extraordinary security hoops just to join a forum. These $treaming spammers have just thrown a new wrinkle in the ongoing spam battle, I think eventually and together we'll get it figured out.
We have some obstacles in place to deter automated spam but I'm 99% sure we're dealing with actual bodies here and as such any obstacles I make for them would effect the whole membership. I want to keep HEF as pleasant to use as possible. Within the next month we will probably be switching to another forum software that is supposed to be more resistant to spam but I'm not sure how effective it will be against what we're experiencing. I'm by no means a computer whiz, if anyone has experience in forums and information you think would help with this problem please contact me by PM. Thanks!
Don't nobody go flagging Fixyou, ME, or CAM either. So far as I can tell two of them are real people, not Good Food from Austin.
I hope it doesn't screw up the user experience. This software runs fast and light from my perspective, some of this junk can be bloated these days....
Thanks for all the work you guys do keeping this site up.
YES, YES they do do a GREAT job.. In the past week the spam has been down, so somethings working.. I lost my PW on another site and inorder to get back on, I had to create another one.. BUT.. the new one had to be atleast 10 characters.. contain caps, a symbol, an under score, multiple numbers and so on.. It was such a hassle, I gave up.. and that $ux.. and even getting a pw from the mods to temporarily get back on was a hassle.. took 3 days.. Its not like your protecting your banking information, for goodness sake.!! I was on the yesterdays tractor site this week and they got spammed HARD.... REAL HARD...
Shoot I think you jinxed it. There's like 2 full pages of them this morning looking at the new posts. I feel for the mods that have to clean this trash up. Greyson
They are getting after it today. They must have real jobs, because it seems worse on the weekends.
Sent around 30 spam posts to the bowels of HEF this morning.:ban The spam picks up on the weekends due to all the college football games on Saturday as well as Monday and Thursday night football. The bastards are persistent but it takes a fraction of the time to ban and remove posts as it does for them to register and post.
At least what they post is such gibberish that it's easy to spot.
I had a busy day, so I was only on at around 7-7:30 this morning. I banned a whole load of them then, that hadn't even posted yet. I'm pretty sure I didn't leave any. Obviously, there were more where those came from... :bash
Same here, very busy day, it's 11:26 PM and I'm just now logging in for the day. I'll be on here for a couple of hours into the morning on my shift.
I suspect that most of the spam threads are automated or at least partially automated. Generally they make no sense, but I haven't noticed spelling errors. Correct spelling + gibberish means that there's probably a text generator being used in there at some level. I have noticed more and more online forms that require you to check a box that says "I am not a robot". Often, there is a simple question that you have to answer before you're able to click submit. Adding something along these lines for a member's first 10, 20, 30 or x number of new threads posted may be a solution. This might be a hassle for new members who want to post, but I'm sure that if there's an explanation as to why the questions are required, most people wouldn't mind. (There could be H.E. related trivia questions to make it fun. If they get the answer wrong, they could be offered a simple math question as a second chance.) I'm not advocating any course of action. Just trying to help troubleshoot.
I just logged in a short while ago and saw a pile on nonsense thread titles. Started to ban a few, and didn't take a moment that someone was a step ahead of me. Checked who was online and found Digger was logged in, figured he was the one mopping them up. Sooo, I went to the opposite end of new posts and started wiping them from that end until we met in the middle, hit 'em from both directions ya know.
LOL! Yeah, I got to one, and saw that he was banned, but still had three threads showing next to his name. I wondered if I'd banned him first and forgotten to move the threads, so I went to move them and they had gone away. I was like, how did that happen?? Then I went to the main page and saw that you were online...
Mods vs Spammers Live *********
THAT'S IT! :drinkup
joispoi, we have a couple things in place to verify humans. We use captcha which requires the applicant to list a series of unique numbers and we also have a unique question that must be answered correctly in order to proceed with their application. I'm convinced these are humans registering.
Steve, it amazes me that the spam is worth anyone's time. I recently read an article about a setup in China where there were hundreds of android smartphones that were set up to be operated by 2 people. The sole purpose of this operation was to provide traffic and reviews to trip advisor. I'm not sure what the angle was for making money off of it. Getting back to the spammers here: once a new member is registered here they can post anything that they want? How difficult would it be to set up a probationary period where new members can't post links until X number of posts or Y amount of time as a member? What would be involved in that? Better yet, if you want to turn the tables on them: new members can't post hyperlinks until they've clicked on the HEF ads a certain number of times. Take advantage of the spammer web traffic. :tong
Problem with this is some guys use photobucket or tapatalk to post their photos.
We did have it set up so that Probationary Members couldn't start threads, but what we found was that so many new members were joining just to post a thread about their particular problem, that we were always having to explain why they couldn't. And frankly, as has been said above, this nonsense tends to stand out, so it's easy to weed out. Probationary Members still can't Private Message, and a couple of other things. I've turned the Admin Control Panel upside down and inside out looking for a button that would prohibit Probationary Members from posting links, but there just isn't one there.
This is true. I guess the question is, how many guys share photos in their first few posts? ....and at what point would adding more hurdles discourage new members from sharing?
Darn I just opened one, I don't normaly, caught me with my guard down. I have been getting sometimes 10 emails a day from various parts of the world wanting me to work from home and make lots of money all I have to do is open the link to thier web sight. I keep dumping them in spam hoping my phone will learn to do it on its own but the addresses are all different and seem to keep coming. Anyone else getting theses nuisance emails
My krypton button is fuzzy
Have you updated your anti-virus lately? If not I would go ahead and do that. Run a scan to see if you have any malware. From what I've been reading about these ********* spammers is it's a range of spam and phishing in order to get personal information.