More Moderators

Spam is becoming a real issue on these forums. I realise certain measures are in place already but they dont work as well as they should. How about some more mods. Even if they only have powers to remove the spam and spammer accounts ?

I would say it just needs more effective filtering.

Allowing any user to post such volume is ridiculous and should have triggered a forum alarm for a mod to investigate. Such features are not difficult to implement.

Well the whole site has been spmmed big time today.

I think it is time to have a human authorize new accounts rather than automatically.

At least erasing it massively seems easy enough, to prevent it without being too "hard on newcomers" however would not be easy to do.

There seems to be some automated spam attacks happening today. We've always been dealing with this kind of thing and improving the site's robustness to spammers, so it's not surprising, it just does not normally surface so visibly.

Getting more moderators to help is not practical, since using manual work to counter automated posting is a waste of time. Also given we get hundreds of signups every day, human-approving each one is also a waste of time, and probably not actually accurate anyway since you don't know if someone will spam until they start posting. It has to all be automated. We already have link filtering systems which are pretty effective and basically make spamming pointless since it can't include any kind of clickable link, but I think spammers just set automated systems loose and don't really care what the consequences are.

Ashley Tom

I have noticed most of the current wave of spam have links as the title. Is this not possible to filter ?

What about a captcha at login?

What about all the other days when you did not notice the spams that were posted and removed ?

There is already a login captcha, but they're not very effective these days, or spam is simply powered by ranks of cheaply paid humans who can obviously solve anything. Filtering links from titles would help, but I already noticed that this wave of spam is using unicode characters to make titles that look like URLs but aren't really, which makes them harder to filter, e.g. myspamwebsite.cóm. This is kind of useless since you can't even copy-paste the URL, but that doesn't seem to stop them!

It's really not much of any inconvenience for me as a user of the forums. So I see a little spam now and again... Or if I saw a lot of spam. So what?

Just saying it doesn't bother me.

Scirra forums appear to suffer from spam much more than any of the other forums I frequent. An effective solution used by the others seems to be to require newbie posts to be approved by a moderator, and until then the newbie is unable to make a second post. Newbies are also unable to start a thread until their probation period is over. Just an idea that is effective.

Oh my.... oh, I see what you're saying now. Wow, that's a lot of spam...

Well something isnt working as it should. I am sure all is being done that can be done but when the forums become unusable, well..

Getting more moderators to help is not practical, I agree with Ashley. This people are doing great work and don't need more moderators to help.

With all the good will in the world the current spam is still dodging the automatic efforts to stop it. I personally logged in at 8:30 and again at 10:30 and its still there, making the forums unusable. My point is that if i was a moderator the spam would have been removed by now.

I am not asking to be a moderator btw, just making a point.