Question Any new ideas to reduce the amount of spam posts

Lately there have been a lot of spam posts here. Is there any way to reduce this by maybe doing some kind of account verification?
Today there probably were more than 100 spam posts in recent messages

 

limiting new users to only post 3-5 messages per day should help..
and or longer than 1 minute per post limit for new users.

more mods, one spammer was active over 1hr yesterday..

other ideas:
pretty sure chatGPT could detect those as spam,
i don't think it would be hard to code API to check post titles,
for example for new users only (first few posts, to save costs, could even batch it as lazy check. (after posted)
(but of course unity doesn't have manpower to do that kind of tools it seems)

 

I mean there are a bunch of spam posts in the AI / Navigation topic since 4:xx AM. Clearly the moderator manpower is rather limited and the automation is failing. Either the "call girls" isn't a filtered phrase or the ' symbol throws off the filter.

Receipts:

 

General Discussion saw a huge number of spam hit it this morning (~9 AM EST) with every post from a unique user that was some combination of a couple names or words and a random number.

 

Yeah.. maybe I'll come back later lol

 

lets go, surely someone is working on AI spam blockers already somewhere?

 

Yes, you can add a basic black list for certain keyword combinations, and it would kill entire spam flood. No need for "ChatGPT" or other complex solutions.

For the recent flood keyword combos would be "dubai call girls", "love spell in", and few others.

Also rather than banning those accounts outright, those could be shadowbanned (as much as I hate this approach), creating illusion that that their posts are seen for a while.

Alternatively, new users posting links could be marked as potential spammers.

However.

This problem existed for many years and unity never did anything about it.

 

Perhaps temporarily closing (readonly) General Discussions may help in the very short term - provided that this spam isn‘t posted by humans.

 

new spam accounts still coming, they seem to pass reCaptcha on the signup then.

if would add extra checkbox or question at signup, it would stop bots temporarily,
until they figure it out and modify automated signup..
it could appear randomly and there could be more than 1 check that human would notice/understand,
or to add those invisible fields in the form that only bot would fill.

 

Maybe a regex to detect phone numbers since this seems to be the whole point of this spam wave?

 

you'd think if a new user posts more than 3-5 posts (rather than comments on other posts) this would be a bit of a red flag, especialy when may of the post titles are similar.. (per new user)

 

Honestly feels like the forum just needs a few extra moderators. There's pretty much only zombiegorrilla left right? On top of the odd Unity staff member who deals with moderation stuff.

 

Recent posts is still full of spam messages with phone numbers

 

tbh I was gonna come here and say "ssshhhhhh but there seems to be less spam today" so I will say its obviously helping, out of interest any idea on how many posts its refusing on a daily basis?

 

This isn't about phone numbers and/or magic spells right? To play the devils advocate, if a human comes in and posts 20 messages in 1 minute about how much he hates C# or asks "how do you write a game" 30 times we consider that unwanted content right?

Surely a new account with zero message views generating 10 posts within minutes of the account being created should set off a flag. It doesn't seem like it would take too many moderators to close an account and delete that user's messages after a simple check of the content (that the flagging routine supplied).

Isn't that just some sort of a service script that runs once every 5 minutes?

 

Me checking forum after few day

 

I'm going to guess (but clearly do not know) that these "alerts" are binary. Either marked or unmarked. A (possibly) more robust system would apply likelihood scores. That way the 90% likely to be spam could be checked. As time permits one moves down the list checking the others. If some spam is found to be in the 60% group the rules can be modified to move it up and if there are false positives in the 90% rules that caused it can be relaxed.

 

I don't think the Unity staff have made any substantial changes to the forum tech in ten years. Even above, they just said they're turning some knobs, not modifying the code. Don't expect anything to change.

[Edit: heh, next week is my decadiversary.]

 

new users are still posting unlimited posts with 1 minute cool down.. (?)

 

really? this didnt trigger spam bot to kick in?

 

Yeah I feel like there's got to be a blocklist of common, only spam related things that can be imported. How many people are going to be asking about herbal supplements and penis pills here?

 

herbal is not likely to be common but .. meh black listed maybe not, but i cant imagine a single good reason to need the penille word on a unity forum...theres a whole bunch of them of course all with the same penille word and various other words too.. sigh.. it has as much need here as in penille enlargement pills in my mailbox.. you know, maybe mine should be bigger. I dont have one Im female!!!

 

In the body of the thread? That shouldn't be, but in the title? I think it makes sense

 

Do you folks think the optimum solution is scanning for suspect words? I couldn't imagine something like that. Why not attack it on the member account level? People who have been here some time aren't spamming are they? And what if it wasn't about pills but about their "incredible software"? Isn't it the unusual amount of traffic from an account that was opened minutes before 20 messages in various categories are posted?

 

There are thousands of sleeper accounts. Made automatically in advance to activate them later as spambots. Nowadays they even try to post (mostly nonsense, gladly) AI-generated BS to be seen as valid accounts.

Today's spam battle should use both tools, blacklisted phrases (not words). e.g.: "penis" is a valid word in many context, the most obvious is during discussing meshes, but "penis enlargement" is a specific phrase not used even during mesh creation, it should be on blacklist. And I think it was until recently. Something happened to the forum's anti-spam function, maybe they are preparing for the move, who knows, the "web-team" is devastatingly silent lately.

 

I genuinely would love to hear how a penis is relavant on this forum, in any context other than name calling.

 

Or phone numbers (except maybe in the job boards)

 

It can be part of the game mechanics.
Typically for adult games. You have for example mechanics of hairs on the wind, or boobies bobbing on jumping characters. So it is totally valid.

However I don't expect such keywords to appear in the main title. But who knows.

 

Yes but you also dont expect like 100 posts about it, from the same dude in 100 minutes etc..

for me it feels a big flag as potential spam.. as is of course any account going from 0 posts to 1 post a minute with no comments or likes being given on anything else

 

There are billions of sleeper accounts. I just guessed as well. Doesn't matter what the definition of a sleeper account is in this context or the idea that someone would set up an account thinking "in 3 months I will post my penis enlargement messages" being patently ridiculous. Maybe the anti-spam function was hacked by sleeper accounts. You just never know

Anybody with access to the forum message database can plainly tell if it is newly formed accounts or "super secret sleepers" posting (or attempting to) dozens of messages per minute or even per hour. Perhaps we should leave the solution to those closer to the issue with access to the message repo.

I'm going to unfollow this if you don't mind. I've got issues that I am actually able to resolve to deal with but please carry on.

 

seems like the cooldown has been removed again?
(bots are spamming every 1 minute and pretty sure yesterday had multiple messages within minute too, from same user)

 

There also is spam in the unity discussions site (the new one), although less

 

could be useful to have some form of if new posts = 0.75 mins (so just under 1 a minute) and more than x people have reported spam on multiple posts, that it lets them believe the posts are successful but puts them on a hold so they dont show up and removes all current posts.