February 20, 2024 - 1:59pm
Spam .
I’m not being critical of the fresh loaf but am honestly puzzled about the apparent amount is spam posted every day (it seems). I really appreciate the moderation who cleans it up! But I sometimes have a really difficult time getting past the Capcha and I’m a human. How does the spam get past it? I’m really interested in learning.
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Dealing with it is the best best - but not this way. There has been an uptick in spam - but expected really. Just flag it and move on - there is a button to do this. Enjoy!
My apologies if you are offended by a question. I don’t know another way to enquire and learn.
Just hit the "report this" (I think that was it - at the bottom) and report it to the moderators. The more it gets reported the more likely it will be removed. Enjoy!
I felt inspred to re-read this advice... eight times!
The spam thing is an arms race with a moving target. Some spammers come up with a way to get past the guards for awhile, then the anti-spam filters get improved, and the cycle begins again. Lately it's been pretty grim, but a year ago I never saw any of this spam.
Maybe Floyd would like to give us a sketch about how spam is handled?
TomP
I recently heard or read a report that AI bots are actually better and faster at solving the Captcha than us humans. The Captchas really serve no purpose then.
If you leave bots uncontrolled, they can carry out these malicious actions on a large scale.
There are hundreds of attempted scripted spam posts a day. Multiple layers of filtering and prevention stop most of them from getting through, but a certain number still do.
At this point I think most of the spam that gets through is being posted by humans, but as others have mentioned the scripting and AI keeps getting better at both getting through the filtering and at posting unique enough spam that it doesn't trigger the content filters.
As to "why": this site has quite a high page rank (Google ranking) for a forum board. 99% of the spam posts here are coming from low-rent SEO services that are trying to capitalize on that page rank.
And well-deserved! kudos!
Thanks for the insights, and congratulations! I knew little about SEO and page rank until you inspired me to look briefly into that aspect of the situation.
The chatbots seem to be overtaking the spam, although some posts are both, with unwanted links. Sometimes, I'd like to reply to a post with "bot", as Tom has done, but I don't want to leave my post there after the bot is removed, so I just settle for pressing "report".