[Imc-tech] Spam Is...Until a Solution Is Found

[Mike Lehman]

Due to the fact that spam advertisements posted as comments to 
legitimate articles have become a major problem on the UC IMC website, I 
will be suspending dealing with such material at this point. When a 
technical solution is achieved that can effectively deal with this 
problem, it really needs to be addressed. Providing a venue for sleazy 
phishing scams and poker ads is certainly not part of our mission.

The rate of such posts now approaches 1,000 a day. This is quite an 
increase from even last week, when the number was typically 200-300 a 
day, making it impossible to consider devoting the time that is needed 
to manually deleting such posts.

If there were some way to facilitate mass deletions within our current 
version of Dada, such as being able to change the editor's page display 
to 100 entries at a time, then it might be feasible to continue manual 
deletions, assuming there is no further increase in the rate of this 
shit. When you can only display 12 enties on a page it simply takes too 
long to deal with the current mess.

We have approximately 48,000 entries at this time in the website's 
database. On the assumption that approximately 1 in 5 of those is an 
original article, then there are about 9,600 original articles for the 
spam to be attached to as comments. This means that in approximately 10 
days, nearly every original article we have will likely be proudly 
displaying advertising from these creeps at the current rate.

I am uncertain how many entries the current version of Dada will 
sustain, but this might be something to check into. By the end of July, 
we will likely be looking at over 100,000 database entries, assuming we 
don't turn off comments or take other such drastic steps in the meantime.

We may reach the point at this rate where the database will no longer 
accomodate all the spam and our legitimate posts as well, but not being 
a technie myself, I don't know what this limit is, other than it is 
finite from what I understand. Those with access to such info on Dada 
might want to give us an estimate of when we might start expecting 
trouble with the website if such a scenario will occur in the near future.

Sorry for this bad news, but it increasingly is a waste of time to 
attempt to manually deal with this.
Mike Lehman