I recently reported a post from a spammer of some sort (mods: I linked to his profile in my post by accident, sorry, I was copying and pasting his name and it copied the link for some reason).
He had posted pornography that was very explicit.
There are many under-16s here. It is illegal to share pornography to underage children.
I am glad that the post was deleted before anyone else could see it. Thank you mods.
But I am worried this will continue.
Something needs to be done in case that more pornography comes along.
PM me if you want a PDF copy of the ICD-10or the Mental Health Act 1983/2007. I ALSO HAVE THE DSM-V BOOK and am a pharmacology student.
I have a visual impairment / neurological problems so I need people to type in clear text and no funny fonts. Also excuse any typos, my vision blocks things out.
I have autism and have problems communicating, PMs included.
Just becasue I type well doesn't mean I speak well. I am only part time verbal.
On some sorts, there's not much the mods can do which they probably havent already done.
IP Bans = Spammers often change them, use proxies, have multiple addresses which they post from.
Puzzles sorted only by humans = Harley introduced this less than a week ago than the previous method. I didnt see the post so I don't know if it was a robot or a human trolling, however it managed to get through captcha which is somewhat impressive.
I dont know how robust the current captcha system is, but captcha is fairly strong at enforcing no bots, although people do pay mass numbers of people to solve them for them, and soemtimse have falws in their system. RECAPTCHA is probably the best version.
Fast moderating work = Sooner people report the sooner it gets removed, Mods are humans too and cant be online 24/7, and having someone perminantly on 24/7 for something which hasnt happened before seems a bit OTT.
I think some of our spam comes from people trolling
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
Thomas Parke D’Invilliers
I am confident that the vast majority of all the spam I have seen recently posted on RYL was completely automated robots, not humans posting. There are just tell tell signs.
Anyway as mentioned on the other thread I have now made changes so that the reg page actually asks you a random question rather than presenting an image which has obviously been programmed around. We can't rely on the poor members and mods to report and delete this stuff it's horrible!
Anyway, there are also a few other things, such as marking the time it takes for someone to fill out the registration page (bots do it way faster than a human ever could) but up until recently the auto spam bot detection systems have been doing a pretty good job of keeping spam at bay. Obviously this recently changed but we are able to respond with multiple moves beyond this one, and this should be enough - so don't worry - they will not win :)
We have vastly reduced the number coming in. Two days ago I cleared over a 100 out in one day and still they kept coming. Yesterday and last night we had only two.
However it is very clear that the ones last night were human spammers breaking the verifications and then handing it back to a program (the two new joiners never got to post a thread). Still got through though. Stopping humans is really hard without stopping valid human members from joining too!
But I'm certainly not out of ammo yet, it's just a case of working up the restrictions (mainly increasing the pain it is to register, not a terrible thing) until we sort it, rather than instantly turning RYL into a nightmare for every proper member just to stop the spammers.
Thanks for the clarifications. I hope this can be sorted soon.
PM me if you want a PDF copy of the ICD-10or the Mental Health Act 1983/2007. I ALSO HAVE THE DSM-V BOOK and am a pharmacology student.
I have a visual impairment / neurological problems so I need people to type in clear text and no funny fonts. Also excuse any typos, my vision blocks things out.
I have autism and have problems communicating, PMs included.
Just becasue I type well doesn't mean I speak well. I am only part time verbal.
why the hell are they targeting us though? this is THE MOST spam filled forum i've seen =s. maybe its not that bad in comparison to other places but out of the forums i visit ryl definitely has the most.
It isn't just us. I'm hearing reports all over the net of major attacks happening at the moment. Perhaps it is a new bit of code they have written and released. Either way it seems to get through any verification image or text like a knife through butter, which suggests bots finding the site, passing it to a human sweatshop worker who completes the form and passes it back. It's big business and with IP's so easily faked, legit users commonly sharing IP's with spammers, and it being sooo easy to auto create free email addresses (thanks for that gmail especially) it's very hard to put in a 100% reliable method of stopping them.
That said I'm certainly not out of other responses yet! We in fact did get more early this morning now, they seem to have started back up again after a lull... so the battle continues :)
oh, i see =s. not really being that good with computers, i thought just implementing a captcha or something on the registration (is there one already? i can't remember) would stop at least most of it. thanks for the reply =]
Yet again, more pornography! I am fortunate that I was viewing RYL on my phone so it only loaded up one picture before I could quit (my phone's internet is slow compared to my laptop).
I do worry about the younger generation on this forum seeing those explicit pictures.
What that guy who posted the pornography has done is against the law as this site has underage people on the forums.
Also, there are may here who have been sexually abused and pornography could bring flashbacks of their abuse.
PM me if you want a PDF copy of the ICD-10or the Mental Health Act 1983/2007. I ALSO HAVE THE DSM-V BOOK and am a pharmacology student.
I have a visual impairment / neurological problems so I need people to type in clear text and no funny fonts. Also excuse any typos, my vision blocks things out.
I have autism and have problems communicating, PMs included.
Just becasue I type well doesn't mean I speak well. I am only part time verbal.
"What that guy who posted the pornography has done is against the law as this site has underage people on the forums.
Also, there are may here who have been sexually abused and pornography could bring flashbacks of their abuse."
Not sure what this means?
RYL blocks hundreds and hundreds of spam bots every 24 hours. The spammers are using free email addresses like hotmail and gmail and often use humans to fill in the sign up form. They certainly don't care about it being illegal or the forum type. Despite the challenges we block almost all spam that tries it on.
Occasionally the odd one does slip through, but we are continually working on improving the protection.
But your concern doesn't suddenly remind me to start doing something about it, I have already spent a lot of time blocking and details the idiots myself already, and will continue to do so until it is sorted.
It sounded like it was trying to help me realise why these things needed to be dealt with.
Things are already being dealt with, and short of moderating all new members before they can join, it isn't going to get a huuge amount more accurate, as I said it is very hard to stop a spammer when normal members use funny names and free email addresses from any number of IP's as well.
So getting both 'ooo, did you realise spam might be bad for the forum!?' and also 'I can't register because the spam protection wont let me in' is kinda a bitch to deal with?
Ok I'm sorry. You can delete this thread if you want. I will not talk about this again.
PM me if you want a PDF copy of the ICD-10or the Mental Health Act 1983/2007. I ALSO HAVE THE DSM-V BOOK and am a pharmacology student.
I have a visual impairment / neurological problems so I need people to type in clear text and no funny fonts. Also excuse any typos, my vision blocks things out.
I have autism and have problems communicating, PMs included.
Just becasue I type well doesn't mean I speak well. I am only part time verbal.
Harley, I think you misunderstood genuine concern for criticism there. Not having spoken to Steel Maiden personally but having seen posts around the forum, I really don't think SM was trying to say that you're doing a rubbish job blocking spam filters - more that SM was expressing genuine concern about the issues that this sort of spam brings. Forgive me if I'm wrong and putting words in your mouth, Steel!
As it happens, I'm pretty sure most younger people will have seen stuff like this a billion times before so seeing explicit pictures probably isn't the biggest issue there is.
Thanks Dreaming, you are correct. The only person I'm angry with/criticising is the person/spambot who posted the pornography in the first place.
PM me if you want a PDF copy of the ICD-10or the Mental Health Act 1983/2007. I ALSO HAVE THE DSM-V BOOK and am a pharmacology student.
I have a visual impairment / neurological problems so I need people to type in clear text and no funny fonts. Also excuse any typos, my vision blocks things out.
I have autism and have problems communicating, PMs included.
Just becasue I type well doesn't mean I speak well. I am only part time verbal.
No steel i didnt mean that at all. It's really annoying on the net that unless you splatter smilies all over everything you write, people just take you for being harsh and accusational.
I too fully share your views and concerns about the content of these posts. Except I am ultimately responsible for them, so take your stress about the situation and multiply it a millionfold.
I am and have been already working very hard to sort this out, and if you think what we have now is bad, you can't imagine what it would be like if we didn't block the dozens if not hundreds that do get blocked every day.
All I was saying, obviously not in the nicest way possible and I'm sorry is that I am already as on top of this as it's possible to be without blocking huge swathes of RYL on uni networks etc. Changes are being made every day and work is being done every day on this matter since it was posted about and since it has started to become such a big problem. There have been a few that have continued to slip through, but basically pointing out how awful they are doesn't really help me...
