[Imc-tech] [Imc-web] Spam Is...Until a Solution Is Found (fwd)

[Zachary C. Miller]

I have not had the free time to deal with this at all. Is there anyone
else out there that can look through the logs and figure out what IP
addresses the spammers are coming from? Should be easy enough but I'm
SWAMPED. If there is anyone that I can give access to the server logs
to who wants to volunteer to figure this out just let me know. 

Mike Lehman wrote:
>
> 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
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-- 
Zachary C. Miller - @= - http://zach.chambana.net/
IMSA 1995 - UIUC 2000 - Just Another Leftist Muppet - Ya Basta!
 Social Justice, Community, Nonviolence, Decentralization, Feminism,
 Sustainability, Responsibility, Diversity, Democracy, Ecology