Spam issue is making this forum unusable

General Topics
1

Can the moderators please do something about all the spam posts? New list member postings should need moderator approval before being accepted.

2

I’ve cleaned up the spam (there were 1000s of spam users!). If a new user accidentally got caught up in the cleanup, please let me know as it was hard to check all users.

However, I don’t know what a good process here is. There is only one moderator actively looking at reports here (hey @WN1X, thanks for all your reports!) and this is not scalable. I don’t have time to look at all new posts either.

@jkowalski I’ve disabled new user signups for now. LMK if you have any thoughts on what we can do to improve the situation.

3

I would reported more, but I hit the limit for a 24-hour period. Is there no option to require new users’ posts to be moderated until they are considered “trustworthy”?

4

These are suggestions from across the web:

  • Via Admin > Settings > Trust Levels, set limits for:
    • Number of posts per day for new users.
    • Time between posts.
    • Number of links/images in posts.
  • I was going to suggest using Askimet, but then I discovered this post: Discourse AI spam detection replaces Akismet plugin - Announcements - Discourse Meta.
  • Via Admin > Settings > Login > must approve users, require all users to verify email before posting.
  • Via Admin > Settings > Login > must approve users, manually approve all new signups (surely there aren’t that many real ones).
  • Get a free API key from for Google reCAPTCH or hCaptcha.
5

Here are the things we run into:

  • We get 1K+ user signups when we get hit by spam attacks. It is often hard to tell fake from real accounts as we see compromised accounts being used most of the time.
  • We don’t have the time or bandwidth to approve new posts (see spam scale in the above point). Currently, I might be the only person paying attention to moderation and I have a very busy full-time job.
  • Even if we rate-limit new users, we still get overwhelmed (see scale above again)
  • Discourse does not have effective tools to do bulk actions/filtering at scale
  • We have enabled 2FA for external auth but it is still not catching spammers.
2 Likes
6

I’ve re-enabled new signups and added hCaptcha in Difficult mode.

1 Like
7

Ok, that clearly did not help as we were overrun again yesterday. I’m trying more spam filtering features now…

2 Likes
8

How about Discourse’s AI spam detection feature? Or using Akismet with Discourse?