BreakPoint
spambots again
Obviously, the forum defenses are not working. I already reported these, so they will be cleaned up in the morning.
I guess the posting rate indicates that a throttling to one post per minute exists. That's not enough.
Clearly, lithium needs to improve here. Hopefully they are collecting enough forensic evidence to track down what is happening.
In any case, there needs to be a 24/7 moderator presence. They seem to exploit the time after midnight in Austin where nobody seems to be watching. There is a need for at least 50-100 users with limited moderation privileges (hide all posts from a new user and temporary ban user from posting. Actually, the spammers should still be able to post as much as they want, but the posts won't show up. Keep them busy ;)).
They also seem to add spam tags for these posts. These tags should be cleaned up too and added to a detection list.
(There are still also more subtle spammers, such as this one)
Hi,
I totally agree on the "24/7 moderator presence"!
When NI is hosting this forum they should also moderate it at all times. It's a shame when there are spammers active at the weekend or at Austin/TX night times. Here in Europe the forum is flooded with SPAM the whole morning...
Hi Intaris,
well, 10 years ago I used SPAM filters (using some BAYES filters) in my email program: those were able to identify SPAM either using some predefined filters or after "forced learning" by just one or two example mails.
So I think setting up a SPAM filter should be very easy, atleast for those SPAM we encounter these days in the forum!
But then how intelligent do you want it to be?
I mean, you'd want it to remove posts from a single user posting the same message again and again. You'd also want to remove posts from multiple users which contain the exact same content. But then you'd also want to remove posts from multiple users with ever-so-slightly different content.
Soon, no spam. But also, no repeat questions asking for the same info on the same piece of homework from a single LabVIEW class on how to control a thermostat/flood-gate* (delete as applicable.
Wait, did I make that sound like a bad thing? 
@altenbach wrote:
Obviously, the forum defenses are not working. I already reported these, so they will be cleaned up in the morning.
Obviously, it takes longer than expected. They are all still here (9:45 am Austin time), hours after the posting stopped. 😞
So, let's see: 150 posts in under 5 hours. three new tags. Posts differ by one word.
Signal processing has given us fancy tools to determine the similarity of signals. It should be easy to define a similarity score here. We could convert the posts to binary and look at the cross correlation peak. 😄
I think it would be best to let a spammer (once identified) keep posting, but keep the posts only visible to him. This way he thinks its still "working" while the forum remains clean for the rest of us.
