The Elgg Community: What one thing lets elgg down? Spammers... Mainly Chinese!

  • @Brett, @Cash, @Evan:

    This is the funniest stuff I've almost ever seen ;-P

    The Dwanged Chinese Spammer actually posting Spam on this particular Topic...

    And Y'All still cain't touch them ? ;-o

  • Why can't they touch them?

    What kind of security do we have for the community site?  I just checked and there's not even a captcha on the registration form - I'm surprised this place isn't getting botted more.

  • ; - )

    I believe there's some heavy duty anti-spam tech-know-how - but guess these must be missing simple checks like "bridesmaid dress" = spam, "loboutin" = spam, "handbag" = spam, and so on.

    I've been collecting such spam content = to try n get some real-life help in determining "what is spam".. watch RayJ's Anti-Spam Filter - this PlugIn is destined to become (almost) the panacea for spam on Elgg based sites.

  • @Matt: Ellg Community uses my antispam plugin for about a week, and breet said the results are good. But none of antispammers are perfect.

  • Captchas are 99% worthless.

    1. They're annoying for normal users.
    2. They've been broken by bots.
    3. Most of the spam we get here isn't automated, but from spam farms.
    4. There are numerous manual "back link apps" that make having a captcha trivial for preventing spam.
    I've listed the steps we've taken to prevent spam a few different places. It boils down to we can't block 100% of the spam without getting false positives, and people get cranky if you prevent them from signing up to a community site to ask a question.
    There's no automated, 100% effective anti-spam solution for anything.
  • Interesting points + confirms (eg. #3).

    'false postives' ? ! yep.. the bane - when normal users get fussed around.

    I still believe that for here @ ElggComm - blocks on content with "bridesmaid dress", "loboutin", "handbag" == spam could help weed out those we already know about;

    Or appoint some (regarded) Elgg Members (*not me;) but some others have expressed interest on and off) who do tend to online and browsing around most of the time or other as spam-cops to delete/hide such dwangz pages, blogs could help keep the river clean(er)..;-o

    I just hate it when I'm browsing ~ 11pm--2 am; and these junkers start flooding ;-O(

    Didn't ElggComm implement Cash's Spam Blocker for hammered URLs and so forth ?

  • Fair enough, I was just curious.

  • Ben, did you even read the thread?  Two posts up Brett explained that the community site won't use captcah and listed reasons why.  This is the second old thread on which you've posted a link to your captcha plugin.  That is almost akin to spam itself.

  • Matt, works fine with me... we've 12.876 users and spammers are going down everyday with us, adn captcha is the only tool that we're using now. So, could be usefull for those that have problem wiht spammers.

    Regards,