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How to get rid of all the spam ?

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LeHomard
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Joined: 10/30/2008
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Recently the Kdenlive forums seem to be overwhelmed by spam, bumping up old threads (sometimes actually digging up useful forgotten topics...) with meaningless posts.

Quite a lot of these spam posts aren't even bots, so captchas won't work (and there already is a captha when you create a new account).

Is there a know way to actually get rid of them ? As soon as I see such a post I "flag as offensive", but I don't know how well that works.

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ttill
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I don't really know how "flag as offensive" works. But I assume it sends an email to jbm. And as jbm hasn't been around here for some time it is probably pretty useless.
Maybe some people should get the right to delete such posts.

Weevil
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I think the only way forward for us regular users is to keep flooding the forum with meaningful posts.

By the way, I'm a Nigerian banker with an urgent need to temporarely store several million dollars on a different bankaccount. If you're interested there's a large reward! Please mail me at 'scammenow gmail com' :P

LeHomard
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I'd be glad to go around deleting the spam posts.

And remember, if ever you want to enlarge your penis : http://www.43things.com/things/view/1081/eat-more-vegetables

fax8
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

Given that this is a Drupal powered website I would suggest installing the Mollom module (http://drupal.org/project/mollom).

Mollom is a free service which helps filtering spam. For more informations see: http://mollom.com/how-mollom-works

ddennedy
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I delete the spam when I encounter it - I have that permission. But I had not visited in a few weeks due to busyness.

rylleman
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

Could you please give some dedicated users rights to delete spam? Call them deputies and give them shiny stars.
And install spam-stopping plugins as mentioned above?

ddennedy
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I can not help with site admin much because I do not have access to the server, know very little Drupal, and too busy with development tasks to learn it. But I will look into how I can let others delete spam too since I do have some extra drupal privileges.

ddennedy
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I found the menu item (Moderate) that shows flagged comments to make it easy for me to them. However, I found a fair number of comments that were flagged by some well-known forum members that were not actually spam, so that gives me pause about giving some others access to delete posts esp. since its not really "my site." Just keep flagging away for now, and I will review them. There are quite a few non-forums pages with a lot of spam comments that I need to delete. sigh.

geoffrey
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I've noticed that most of the posts in the Download section of the website also appear to be spam.

ddennedy
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

As much as I like the idea of being able to comment everywhere, the reality is that we can not adequately filter and moderate it. Therefore, I disabled commenting just about everywhere except the forums which we regularly check and which clearly shows us new activity. I think we are in much better shape now.

Marko
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Joined: 10/22/2009
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I think I have detected a new form of spam - this guy "egypt" is copying older posts, to give his posts some seemingly on-topic text, before adding the ad link.
See:
http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/chromakey
(the last message)

ttill
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?
geoffrey
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I think it is time to bring this up again. I like to read through the forums offering help when possible, but it seems so many of the "active forum topics" are actually spam that look almost like real messages - it is very discouraging. Maybe all links should be disabled or get a better spam filter or more moderators?

ddennedy
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I gave LeHomard, geoffrey, ttill, rylleman, Marko, and Weevil permission to administer the comments. You can access flagged comments via the left-hand menu Administer > Content management > Moderate.

LeHomard
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

Thanks Dan, I'll try to comme here regularly to check the Active forum topics.

Edit : I now have a "delete" button for removing posts, but I can't find the "administer" link to see flagged comments. Any idea ?

rylleman
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

Thank you for the trust ddennedy!
I will try to do my best at keeping the spam on the other side of the stick.

Just out of curiosity, if someone accidently deletes a post that is not spam, do you moderators have the means to recreate it?

geoffrey
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

Dan - Thanks. I think this will help.

LeHomard
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I've just deleted about 50 spam posts by user Jannylon. Manually deleting all posts when there's a massive "spam attack" like that is really not possible. We don't have the manpower to go and check regularly enough and spend have an hour deleting posts.

The problem is that these spammers aren't robots, they are real people paid to put links all over the web.

One solution that is often used in forums is to limit the possibility to add links. For instance you can only add picture or links after 10 posts, and 5 days.

If a spammer can't post links he'll probably not take the pain of posting relaistics comments, then coming back a few days later, he'll just go to another site.

Would it be possible to implement this on Drupal ?

Marko
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Joined: 10/22/2009
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I think "unsusbscribing" the known spammers could also help, this would force them to go through the captcha chore every time...

I consider myself a human, but had a bit of a problem with captcha on this forum, I think it was the third time around that I got it right :-)

Weevil
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

Aah I only just now viewed this thread again. Thanks for your trust Dan and I'm sure we 'mods' can (and will!) make this forum, this program, the internetz and the world in general a better place!!!

muttley
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

A few years ago I set up a forum using simplemachines(simplemachines.org). This software gave the users great flexibility, especially in the registration process for new users.... and it's free!

Granjow
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

@Dan, I can delete spam posts, but there is no Admin menu. Am I missing something?

Weevil
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I'm having some difficulty deleting spam at the moment, it doesn't work although I see the delete button. Any mods have the same problem?

ttill
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

I also have this problem. Already posted to the mailing list:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=4C580DFC.70407%4...

ddennedy
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

Sorry if you can not delete. I do not know drupal well, and I do not want to take the time to figure it out.

motioncontol
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Re: How to get rid of all the spam ?

Removed ..