What Not To Do With Spam Bots (do not respond to them plz)

[silvaril]

Heya

Each post can only be reported once until dealt with by Caste'.

Consequently, it isn't like we can flood Caste' with more than there exists.

I tend to report each post even if the bot has posted 25 times, if only because then people who also try to report a post get to know that some action was taken already, and that more is pending.
More of a community positive spin thing than a rile Caste' with spam thing...

Of course, Caste' being on the receiving end may not quite feel the love

[Gryfalcon]

Of course, Caste' being on the receiving end may not quite feel the love

That is a perfect summary of my question: Am I making it harder for the board admin by flooding his box with SPAM reports or making it easier by flagging things so he doesn't have to scan the boards himself?

[Profound_Darkness]

That is something I would also love to know... I myself have the habit (particularly at 'night') of finding all the posts of a spam bot and flagging them.

I would love it if there was a legal loophole whereby you could charge the spam bot owners a cleanup fee... 'you appropriated our servers without our permission for your advertisement which was itself an inappropriate act and cost us extra time and money (we could have used for other more productive activities) to clean up your mess, here is the bill'.

I'm sure some unsuspecting person who's computer had become part of a botnet would get caught in the crossfire though .

[LaDoncella]

whats wrong today?
general discussion has 1,5 pages of spam. And the rest of sections like 0,5 page.

[ZedF]

The spam bots do seem to be especially active just now. I was finding it hard to locate he signal for all he noise, but then I noticed a handy feature: by opening a spam bot's profile and marking it as a foe you can auto-ignore its posts. It's not a perfect solution but it does help weed out garbage posts once you've identified a spambot.

[castewarkp]

Of course, Caste' being on the receiving end may not quite feel the love

That is a perfect summary of my question: Am I making it harder for the board admin by flooding his box with SPAM reports or making it easier by flagging things so he doesn't have to scan the boards himself?

Easier. Hunting for bot posts sucks, but if they're flagged, it makes things that much easier.

For those interested, apparently someone figured out a way around re-captcha, which uses snippets of OCR text from books being digitized. It's generally regarded as the most powerful system out there. Only now, and nobody is entirely sure, and re-captcha isn't saying anything, either a) spammers are paying humans to get around it, or b) someone has found a script exploit. Or maybe they're tied together.

How bad a day it is for spambots is hard to qualify. A few recent days saw a dozen bots appear, but they only posted one or in a couple of cases two posts. Today say three bots appear, one of which posted dozens and dozens of times.

There are steps we can take, but most of them will affect you the user as much as the bots. Like putting a time limit on posting. If a bot has to wait ten minutes before it can post again, that reallyl limits days like today... it's also a giant pain in your ass as a regular poster.

So, for now the plan is as it always is. Cycling offensives, manual clean up, banning suspicious emails, and patience until the storm dies off or re-captcha figures out a way around this issue.

thanks.

[mystiqblackcat]

Be glad when they are gone.

[amtie]

I think they're gone now. Either Caste has found a very efficient way of dealing with them as soon as they appear. Or they ran away after hearing about the AI Virus 'mail. Or they saw the humans inadvertantly taking over for a while, afraid of being culled by said AI Virus, and took a tea break.