Better anti-spam measures.

It's been years, and spam situation hasn't improved.

Problems.

1. Lots of spam bots.
2. 30 second timeout between reporting spambots.

Can either of those be fixed? I don't see a point of waiting 30 seconds between flagging posts for spam. This is exceptionally annoying.

@UnityMaru

 

Yup. It's bad.

From comments by mods from before, I realize that it's not bots, it's instead real people making spam posts. That makes sense - some places have very, very low vages, and hiring people to make spam accounts and post spam might actually make sense.

I think you have to do some kind of shadow banning-like things to handle that:
1: don't ban spammers. Instead, shadow-ban them. To them it looks like they can create threads and posts. The rest of the forum just doesn't see those.
2: When a user with a low post count creates a thread, show it to them as created, but don't show it to other users before a mod has looked at it.

It seems to me, though, that this is an organizational problem rather than a tech problem. If the people in charge of running the forums doesn't have the authority to make the web dev team do stuff, or if Unity doesn't have the ability to update the forum software otuside of the configuration options that are built-in, nothing will ever get better.

 

Yes - from the data we've scrapped when handling these reports, we're more and more sure that these are not bots but moreso humans doing this, as Baste pointed out

I would disagree with this - we have raised several requests internally to have this addressed. It's just that many of the proposed changes we think work, don't really turn out that way.

I appreciate a lot of people are not happy with the spam situation. I'm not really that happy either (and that's me putting it politely!)

We have fixes going through the chain still in aim to curb this. With regards to the 30 second delay of the spambot, let me see what I can do about that...

 

Can we at least remove the goddamn waiting timer for reports?
Or add "report and ignore user" button?
There are a lot of spammers, they're annoying, and the fact that you need to WAIT to report them quickly is even more annoying.

 

I put at the bottom of my post about the timer

 

The change to the spam report timer has been amazing. It was great being able to report all of the entries in one go instead of it taking like 5-6 minutes due to 30 second waits for each one

Thank you!

 

I rarely reports posts nowadays because of that new "wait before reporting policy". It feels like the mods do not want to know about spam and make it so that people just give up on that.

 

What do you mean? I seem to still have a report timer.

So there's no way to deal with this stuff:

 

I was able to do a report like 5 seconds after one another, multiple times in a row?

Maybe I am just special To be fair I have been reporting an insane amount of spam often so really glad I can now do it faster, as I certainly would never abuse the report feature!

 

Around February 17th, they lifted the waiting time constrain for a few regular reporters. @LeonhardP knows the details.