[UCIMC-Tech] Spam Mass Deletion Disabled

Fri Dec 9 12:46:42 CST 2011

I see I misread and the spam limit is 1,000/day. There are days like 
that, but not often, FWIW.

Still a lot of guts on the floor everyday...
Mike

On 12/9/2011 12:43 PM, Mike Lehman wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> IMC-Tech mailing list
> 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/f306ce44/attachment.html>