Spam prevention at TJC

Closing a spam question doesn't really help. Deep cleaning can only be performed by the admin team.

I suspect that closing will make the deep cleaning a three-keystroke job for the admin team, rather than having them have to identify each post individually.

It makes it mildly easier for me as a moderator. I don't need to confirm deletion if the question is already marked spam. Carsten said Jolla IT is working on proper cleanup. Meanwhile I try to keep an eye on newly created accounts to reduce the influx of new spam

just blocked some new users and deleted a few posts, but it is again that many that an admin needs to do that from backend/db

But at least we can help a bit by marking the spam, so it's easier to find and delete.

Also we should frequently answer this question to bring it back to the front and show tge world that we are still alive and don't let the spambots win :)

That's mainly relevant if new posts are flooding in, as then I can just click on the username and proceed to block them. Prod chemist or me on IRC if a new surge happens.

Old spam will get cleaned up by Tigeli and his squad, so also not necessary to touch.

I retaged a couple of older questions as "spam" but stopped after the info from the jolla-admin. Hope everything will get back in good shape here on TJC.

yep, started again

Some possible rules that can be enforced automatically:

• only one account can be registered from one IP address the same day

• account activation via email or SMS, delayed one hour, only one account per email address/phone number, junk addresses not allowed

• not more than 3 questions and 6 answers/comments per user the same day if low karma

• account closed/blocked automatically after 3 questions or comments in a non-English language, all contributions deleted or hidden

@objectifnul could be a further good ideas. but last one could be really complicated i think. that is a full-time job for a human to control it. or should be a powerful process if it is automatic (means $$$$).

Well, the posts mostly in non usual character sets are now blocked, and also autoblocking of users is in place, so lets see how it goes...

@Keto wow! i thought that the blocking of non usual character could be really complicated or expensive... seems then not to be. that's fine.
just for curiosity: could you please explain how the auto-blocking of users happened, and maybe how does it works to unblock it (in case it is done mistakenly)?
next question that i have is, are you prepared too if there is a massive English spam "overflow"?
Does make sense making the user registration something more complex too, to reduce those kind of misused (in english tongue too)? each time i remarked that those people were registered for a couple of minute ago.. and then post there threads like world-master next few minutes.
objectifnul has told some interesting point about rules for new users.No idea if it make sense or is workable.I think new users could wait at last one day until activation, and could have reduced thread productions. and tags like "spam" and "spammer" could make for the rest easy to stop it.
are just suggestions. don't want to make your job.
thank you for hearing and answering. that's great :-)

User is auto blocked after three post attempts that are considered as spam by the automatic checks. And we get notified of this so that we can remove the block if it was false positive.

For the spam prevention we took the Askbot built-in support for Akismet spam cheker in use. But that turned out to be ineffective against the non-English spam, so at the moment we are treating everything that is mostly outside of the ASCII range as spam also. It is currently very crude measure, but hopefully blocks most of the spam (until they figure out something else ;)

We will also see what can be done about the new user registration. And thank you all for all the patience, help and suggestions :)

I hope that's not required for spam protection then, since Google is blocked here.

Via hosts.deny ? Doesn't work for me (unless I use it wrongly)

No, just in the browser.