[UCIMC-Tech] Spam Mass Deletion Disabled

[Mike Lehman]

Chris,
Thanks for the update. Looks like things are OK now, but overnight is 
the problem time for spam so we'll see. Yeah, if the monthly limit is 
1,000 spams, there's no way to keep up with crap we attract. Not sure 
how effective Mollom is as far as using the reporting feature, which I 
typically do, because I see pretty much the same stuff get through it so 
doesn't appear to learn from the resources expended to do that.

Yeah, quite familiar with the balance between anonymous posting and spam 
tolerance. We're stuck with some form of anonymous posting as an IMC -- 
unless we no longer desire to keep that commitment. Short of dropping 
that, there are several policy changes that could help with that I could 
suggest, for instance a blog separate from the Newswire's so that Local 
Yokel can chat with the faux-cop troll at his leisure, for instance, but 
no one seems much interested in the problems of web editing. Which is 
not really Tech's responsibility, but which no doubt creates issues that 
require Tech resources to implement.

I'd be glad to drop this baby in someone else's lap, but am sticking 
with it for now in the interests of consistency. Eventually, I grow weary...
And the website will be virtually useless in short order without human 
intervention.
Mike

On 12/9/2011 10:23 AM, Chris Ritzo wrote:
> Mike,
>
> I just made an adjustment to the comment form, enabling text analysis 
> for spam protection rather than the captcha. One of the issues that's 
> certainly causing some spam is that the service we're using 
> (http://www.mollom.com) is free up to a certain number of legit posts 
> and spam blocks. The IMC site is regularly going over that limit, so I 
> imagine what's happening is that we hit the limit and then spam gets 
> through. To improve this, the IMC can consider paying for the Mollom 
> Plus service, which is 30 EUR/month for up to 1000 legit posts per day 
> and up to 1000 correct captchas per day. It also offers better 
> performance.
>
> Anyone else on the tech list have ideas about better spam blocking on 
> a Drupal site?
>
> Beyond that, monitoring spam posts is just a fact of life of sites 
> like ours where open & anonymous posts are allowed. Spam monitoring in 
> general is a full time job that people actually get paid to do- part 
> of a larger conversation I'm trying to open in our circles about the 
> actual costs of tech infrastructure and support which needs to be 
> addressed. A volunteer working group or volunteer web editors just 
> don't have the capacity or interest in becoming spam monitors. I think 
> this every time I log into one of our Mailman lists to clean out spam.
>
> Anyway, I'll bring this up at our next board meeting, but if you could 
> let me know if the above change has an effect on spam comments that 
> would be awesome.
>
> Chris
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 9:06 AM, Mike Lehman <rebelmike at earthlink.net 
> <mailto:rebelmike at earthlink.net>> wrote:
>
>     The website was back up and mass delete is working again this
>     morning, so I cleaned up 500+ pieces of spam that arrived last night
>
>     Makes me wonder...Is there anyway that a "duplicate post" or other
>     such dialogue that interrupted the posting process could be
>     inserted if the title is the same to prevent such abuse? If N=>2,
>     it would throw a wrench in the automated process used (posts were
>     coming in at around 10/minute at its height) since I doubt a human
>     was doing it that rapidly, without being too obtrusive to
>     legitimate posting?
>
>     Anyway, something like that is what I want for Xmas...or maybe
>     someone else that pays enough attention to the website to help
>     clean up the crap from time to time.
>     Mike
>
>
>     On 12/9/2011 12:22 AM, Mike Lehman wrote:
>
>         The spammers are busy tonight. I deleted a hundred or so
>         earlier with the mass delete option box checked.
>
>         Came back and there's lots more. This time, I get an error
>         messages when trying to do the same thing:
>         "An illegal choice has been detected. Please contact the site
>         administrator."
>
>         Then the server crashed -- or something. Connection is timing
>         out. Probably sack time, so if anyone gets the chance to clean
>         things up once it's working, indulge yourself.
>         Mike
>         _______________________________________________
>         IMC-Tech mailing list
>         IMC-Tech at lists.chambana.net <mailto:IMC-Tech at lists.chambana.net>
>         http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/imc-tech
>
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     IMC-Tech mailing list
>     IMC-Tech at lists.chambana.net <mailto:IMC-Tech at lists.chambana.net>
>     http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/imc-tech
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/imc-tech/attachments/20111209/eac69f79/attachment.html>