Leaving Spam on your forum: yay or nay?

[Cpvr]

What are your thoughts on leaving spam on your forum? Do you think it’s a good idea to leave it in your community, or do you clean it up right away?



Personally, I don’t allow spam to linger on my forum at all and make sure to clean it up as soon as it’s posted.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

What are your thoughts on leaving spam on your forum? Do you think it’s a good idea to leave it in your community, or do you clean it up right away?



Personally, I don’t allow spam to linger on my forum at all and make sure to clean it up as soon as it’s posted.

I will delete it as soon as I can.

I usually hard delete spam bot spam. I move human spammer content to the hidden post storage board. That way, we can keep track of who spam that's a regular person and not an obvious bot or Xrumer account.

 

[AWS]

I delete as soon as I see it although not much gets past the Invision built in spam system.

I see a popular admin forum that seems to like the spam they get. I see more spam posts in the new posts. I guess content is content even if it is spam.

 

[Tracy]

I see a popular admin forum that seems to like the spam they get.

If you are talking over at Admin Junkies, they for some reason are getting a LOT of data dump and cyber recovery spam. Pretty sure it's all human based. I report it every time I see it but I don't know why staff doesn't catch it if it is that apparent.

 

[JoelR]

If you see any spam at Admin Junkies, please use the report function! It helps a lot to trigger a search for other spam.

 

[Tracy]

If you see any spam at Admin Junkies, please use the report function! It helps a lot to trigger a search for other spam.

I do... almost every day and sometimes multiple times a day!
But they are easy enough to spot when checking new posts.
Some of those that are getting through could be prevented by using the XF spam tools.
The Spam Phrases option could be of benefit. If I remember right, once a user posts above the set amount they are able to bypass those spam tools.

 

[frm]

I move all spam posts to a hidden "Trashed" thread so that I can analyze phrases, etc., to get a better idea of what to protect against as there's not a one-size-fits-all solution to blocking spam.

Admins are hesitant to share their blocked lists, with good reason, as they probably worked on it over the years of forum management.

 

[Cedric]

If you see any spam at Admin Junkies, please use the report function! It helps a lot to trigger a search for other spam.

Honestly, why do you depend on your members to tackle spam? I don't like to call you out publicly, but it's been pretty clear you either don't care about it, or you just don't look at it.

I've seen several bulks of spam, even members on AJ notified you continually and there's nothing being done it - even when you're online multiple times. There's so much spam accounts that aren't even deleted.

 

[frm]

There's so much spam accounts that aren't even deleted.

As addressed previously a conversation with another admin. I do not delete spam accounts. This ensures that they can't use the same email again. Although I know (from experience) that they have 1000s to pick from, it at least widdles it down, and it might even error out on signup where it's skipped the first time, saving some work for that day at least.

They're "members", but don't count in my member statistics due the the account state they're put in.

 

[AWS]

If you see any spam at Admin Junkies, please use the report function! It helps a lot to trigger a search for other spam.

In my short time there I have reported a few. Nothing was done with them.

 

[Cpvr]

If you see any spam at Admin Junkies, please use the report function! It helps a lot to trigger a search for other spam.

Members shouldn’t have to report spam—that’s the responsibility of the community manager.


Google won’t be so forgiving if they start deindexing and penalizing AJ. When that happens, you’ll likely see a significant drop in traffic, but that’s a lesson you may need to experience firsthand.





I’d strongly recommend familiarizing yourself with Google’s spam policies.

Spam Policies for Google Web Search | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers

The spam policies detail the behaviors and tactics that can lead to a page or an entire site being ranked lower or completely omitted from Google Search.

developers.google.com

The same applies with Bing

Web Spam Filtering

As I mentioned in the July 15 blog introducing Bing Index Quality, one of the key dimensions of our work is web spam detection and filtering. The overview of our approach to this complex problem will be the focus of today’s update. What is web spam? On the surface, our definition is fairly...

blogs.bing.com

 

[Tracy]

As addressed previously a conversation with another admin. I do not delete spam accounts. This ensures that they can't use the same email again.

If you process them as spam users you don't have to delete them in XF. They stay in the user base, they just don't show up in member list.




Shows the difference in rejected users (by the system) and those that are marked as spammers, so there is no need to delete them.
As an aside, over the years I've accumulated a decent spam email list for use with my XF sites and have my banned email list available for download. It has 174 confirmed domains and/or email accounts that have been used over the years on the site. I don't try to do much with gmail as it's so easy to create junk ones you can easily capture valid ones when trying to use wildcards.

Banned email list

Banned email list

xenforohelp.com

 

[JoelR]

Members shouldn’t have to report spam—that’s the responsibility of the community manager.


Google won’t be so forgiving if they start deindexing and penalizing AJ. When that happens, you’ll likely see a significant drop in traffic, but that’s a lesson you may need to experience firsthand.





I’d strongly recommend familiarizing yourself with Google’s spam policies.

Spam Policies for Google Web Search | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers

The spam policies detail the behaviors and tactics that can lead to a page or an entire site being ranked lower or completely omitted from Google Search.

developers.google.com

The same applies with Bing

Web Spam Filtering

As I mentioned in the July 15 blog introducing Bing Index Quality, one of the key dimensions of our work is web spam detection and filtering. The overview of our approach to this complex problem will be the focus of today’s update. What is web spam? On the surface, our definition is fairly...

blogs.bing.com

Hi,

We already moderate the community for spam every day; there are users who are caught as part of the registration and we also have staff members who catch spam when they can. I appreciate your thoughts, but I was simply providing a helpful point that we appreciate members who use the report function when appropriate. That's why the report function exists after all.

 

[frm]

If you process them as spam users you don't have to delete them in XF. They stay in the user base, they just don't show up in member list.

I know.

They're "members", but don't count in my member statistics due the the account state they're put in.

I was saying for the sake of "deleting" users. Another admin had a conniption that I don't delete users. The reason why, is so that they can't come back. But, they're not counted in my forum statistics (like some forums do by placing them in another user group and not treating them as spam users, though still adding them to proprietary spam filters) to inflate to big board numbers.

 

[Tracy]

I was saying for the sake of "deleting" users.

Deleting a user just because they are a spammer for any reason is one of the worst actions you can take. Place them in a group where they can't do anything and most software already has the ability to prohibit reuse of existing user names or email addresses.

 

[frm]

Deleting a user just because they are a spammer for any reason is one of the worst actions you can take. Place them in a group where they can't do anything and most software already has the ability to prohibit reuse of existing user names or email addresses.

Agreed. I'm sure the other admin does the same thing and it was just a sleight-of-hand argument in terms of "deletion".

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Deleting a user just because they are a spammer for any reason is one of the worst actions you can take. Place them in a group where they can't do anything and most software already has the ability to prohibit reuse of existing user names or email addresses.

Why is it the worst action?

 

[Tracy]

Why is it the worst action?

You lose the history (unless you copy it into a specific list) of their email and their IP. With the email already in use, it cannot be reused. With the user banned the IP(s) that they use usually also get marked as bad if reported to spam services.
It's like banning someone from your business then erasing any data you have on them (name, photos, memories, etc).
Deleting them deprives you of those features.
Just on the SMF system these would have been lost... and there are 150 pages of attempts from the IP using the same two user names.


In this case, the usernames are banned, but the IP is not. That IP is from a VPN in Russia, which does have a history of being heavily used for spam, but there might still be real people coming through, so I have the entire ASN for that IP marked in CloudFlare for managed challenges.
These two apparently are apparently automated as the last date they attempted was 12/11, which was when I entered the ASN into the CF WAF list.