And some of them are even putting smiley faces in their spam.
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Any word on identifying and taking legal action against the spammers and/or their service providers?
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Merged the new spam thread in with the larger one.
As LazarX mentioned above, we're aware of these spam accounts, we're doing what we can, and you do not at all need to feel as though you must sit and flag posts for minutes/hours on end. Our staff is doing what we can with the tools that we have. The unfortunate truth is that these spammers are actually real people (not robots), and that makes our solutions to the problem a lot more limited.
So flagging the posts does nothing to help you guys?
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Still you are doing amazing job!
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Hey, if the Koreans keep this up, can we get titles by our screen names. Like frequent RPG Superstar voters, only frequent Spam Flaggers?
Just kidding, of course. We definitely appreciate the time you put into keeping the boards clean for us!
OK, so
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Hey, if the Koreans keep this up, can we get titles by our screen names. Like frequent RPG Superstar voters, only frequent Spam Flaggers?
Just kidding, of course. We definitely appreciate the time you put into keeping the boards clean for us!
I'll just take an overall survivor of the spam wars tag for every account active during this time.
I know it would be a pain but could it be set up where the first few new threads by a new account have to be checked before they go live?
Now they're adding questions in...oddly phrased...English!
Sigh...
Well, I have to tap out now, I'm working daylight today.
See you later.
I think, just to make me feel slightly better, I'll be flagging during the Sharknado marathon and imagining the center sending this stuff out as the target this time!
The flags help, but they aren't the only tool we have. What I really needs is a way to get dripping remains of the spammers off. I don't think a normal bath will get out the stench of their splattered remains.
Prestidigitation apply liberally after every good round of squishing.
Time for a breakfast break - disintegrate isn't gonna just restock itself.
I don't know what you folks are doing but - thanks!
Looks like (at least for now) Korea is spared a sharknado assault.
Don't rest just yet. Get the sharknado ready--they're still coming.
And when they stop, release it anyway. Because shame on them for being spammers. Get a *real* job, you jerks.
I have to go now.
My campaigns need me.
Now they're adding questions in...oddly phrased...English!
{. . .}
I think those might be separate spammers.
Also, remember that just because the bulk of the spam is apparently in Korean (can't tell for sure), it doesn't mean that Korea (South Korea anyway) as a whole is in on that. Lots of people in Korea have better things to do(*) than spam us. The spammers might not even be in Korea itself(**) -- the United States isn't the only nation plagued with crooks who cook up scam schemes from offshore to plague its citizens.
(*)Like for instance, playing StarCraft and usually kicking our rears at this, and facilitating this and other life-enhancing activities with a superior information technology infrastructure.
(**)While it is possible that the spammers posting in Korean are jerks in some basement in Korea, it is also highly likely that they are on some island out of easy reach of the Korean police, and using their spam on Paizo's site to scam people in Korea (hence the use of Korean script and language).
Nice job on cleaning up GD.
No prob; sometimes, it helps to have fire on your side!
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Also, remember that just because the bulk of the spam is apparently in Korean (can't tell for sure), it doesn't mean that Korea (South Korea anyway) as a whole is in on that. Lots of people in Korea have better things to do(*) than spam us. The spammers might not even be in Korea itself(**) -- the United States isn't the only nation plagued with crooks who cook up scam schemes from offshore to plague its citizens.
Sure--not knowing Korean, I can't tell if these posts have the same sort of grammatical idiosyncrasies as the English in the typical 419 scam email.
They have returned. To battle stations!
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They have returned. To battle stations!
Either they are figuring out when our hours usually end, or maybe they are just starting up their work day.
Time to rain havoc and let loose the pigs of war!
There is an urgent need for deleting raid. I've flagged whatever casino spam I've found, but it's getting out of hand.
Holy crickeys.....general discussion's flooded.
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Massively... And I think I've managed to flag everything so far :D
EDIT: Actually since these people keep spamming new accounts per two posts, it might make them pretty angy if there was a questionaire with about six random questions (in random order) requiring written answers. Making the registration take a while doesn't bother normal humans nearly as much as it would these repeated account creators :)
No kidding, i'm flagging whatever i can, but they refresh thrice with new ones, i'm sure :/
Yes, apparently so. Moreover I've just tried to search for one of their sites today and google found that they are doing the same kind of flood on you tube for example. Really do they think that they are making that casino bussiness better? What kind of swindle this must be?
Why? If they can filter what I've flagged today then all spam is gone till now.
EDIT: Just in case you are tired of opening all the links for flagging you might consider using plug-ins like linkclump fr chrome (Fire Fox has something similar AFAIK).
This is ridiculous. Paizo might as well institute business hours for the website, because as long as there's nothing limiting new accounts from being created and spamming dozens of threads all night long, the entire forum becomes basically useless at night.
Well, the other parts of the site are remarkably free of this malady.
Aaaahhhhh, they're swarming.
Unleash the sharknado...and sharktopus and piranhaconda and all the Lake Palacid alligators and all the anacondas...
OK, I'm going to have to tap out for a while. I'm heading up to visit my 82-year old mom, who fell earlier this month and broke her right shoulder.
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They have returned. To battle stations!Either they are figuring out when our hours usually end, or maybe they are just starting up their work day.
I'd say they absolutely have figured out your hours! The mornings before you guys get in are murder, as are the hours after you guys leave. The weekends tend to be even worse.
Unless you guys can figure out some way to keep these pieces of %#$! out completely, it almost seems like Paizo needs moderators to alternate hours and/or work from home to take care of these attacks during the non Paizo work hours.
I'm actually starting to wonder if this is less random spam, and more some kind of sustained, intentional attack specifically on Paizo
The honest truth is, unless this problem is fixed, the forums are going to become pretty much useless except during Paizo business hours. I know I've said it before, but the situation is really becoming depressing ...
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One has to wonder if this isn't a prank targeting Paizo specifically. Maybe a bitter former poster or something. It's hard to imagine anything else being worth this level of personal effort.
Battle Stations!
The Paizo Forums shall not fall!
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I do not like to suggest this, but I think it is time to disallow new account creation overnight and on weekends and force all new accounts to be "approved" by a moderator, during normal business hours and post that in real large text at the top of the Messageboard screen. Obviously let folks that have accounts that are in "good" standing create alias, but all new ones, with their first post, go straight to the moderators.
Right now there are over 1200 spam entries in Paizo General Discussion, and that means a lot of wasted time on Chris, etc. part in cleaning up this stuff (yea, that is the word, stuff!).
-- david
edit: Over 1300 now
F%@@ing goddamn shit is what you mean Papa, it's okay you can swear, they have a filter for that :-)
Just whatever you do, don't say Smurf
Edit: shit! I said it!
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Constructive ideas:
What if you implemented a post or thread creation cooldown for new accounts?
Or just a delay between account creation and when you are first allowed to start a new thread.
I won't say whether or not my ideas are actually any good but we need to find some solution.
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F$!&ing g%*$%@n s$@@ is what you mean Papa, it's okay you can swear, they have a filter for that :-)
Just whatever you do, don't say xxxxx
Edit: s%%*! I said it!
heh, yea I know about the filter, but we have an almost 3 year old granddaughter and I am trying very hard to watch my language since she repeats everything.
-- david
It's hard to imagine anything else being worth this level of personal effort.Money.
Where is the profit in individuals posting to a forum in a language few of the frequenters can read? I sense this is a prank.
Where is the profit in individuals posting to a forum in a language few of the frequenters can read? I sense this is a prank.It's hard to imagine anything else being worth this level of personal effort.Money.
It's to do with search engines. Basically, if the sites these people are promoting appear on enough legitimate sites, in many locations, a search engine will identify them as "popular", making them more likely to become top searches.
They frankly don't give a monkey's about us or Paizo, but are trying to fool Google.
Good heavens, where's a moderator when you need one? Normally, they'd have shown up by now!
What about this idea: every time there's a new thread (from a new member or always for anyone), the title is scanned as it was an image, then an OCR (Wikipedia) scanner attempts to get the text from that image. If then the scanner finds a url/phone number/whatever-malicious-string, the thread is automatically deleted/hidden, while the user is banned. Maybe his IP could be blacklisted, but I'm not sure about that.
Could this work?
EDIT:
I gave OCR some attempts, and while it needs high resolution (easily circumvented by increasing the font dimension before the image is created) which on my screen I do not have, it reduced the title of a spam thread to a series of ASCII characters, that filter can analyse pretty quickly.
well, they havent touched the pbp section...yet.
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Something has to be done. More than 2/3 of the threads in the Website Discussion forum at this point, are spam. That's more than 1000 threads.
And this is with the moderators actually not-at-GenCon. I fear for next week; the forum will be unusable during one of the most important retail weeks of the year.
Attention all Paizoids! How can we, the forum-ites who aren't at GenCon, help you out?