So the amount of spam

Is way up. Way, way up.

I'm not sure if there's something you messed up, or if there's jsut somebody targeting you, but man oh man browsing the forums feels like browsing the web without adblock.

The obvious solution is to just not allow new users to create a thread instantly, but rather queue it for moderation. That worked fine for UA for a while. Any reason that couldn't be implemented on the forums? Surely that's got to be an option in the forum software.

 

Yep and this thread will be locked very soon... as was mine once.

 

We've not changed anything so far - I'm waiting for the webteam to get back to me about beefing up the spam filters to stop this. I assure you I am unhappy with these spambots as you are.

Today, I'm going to our Security team to investigate if we can make it harder for spambots to make accounts in the first place.

 

I've just been lazy/busy recently, usually mods can remove a ton before it's seen, but I'm focusing on my game

 

Yeah, we're certainly trying our best with cleaning it up. In an ideal world, I'd love to have it prevented entirely.

 

@UnityMaru any update on the game plan to combat this, I know you said you were trying to cook some stuff up?

Ive also noticed a ton and I dont think its down to anything but the community being targeted by more and more bots.

Its gone from mostly keto spam to a bunch of other stuff popping up.

Also @UnityMaru it would be great to be able to report comments on blog posts. I always add a comment below a spam comment saying "please delete this spam comment" and that usually works but its a roundabout way of doing it. I really want to and enjoy helping remove all the spam but it would be nice if it was easier to do!

Same with the reporting spam more than once in 30 seconds, thats getting irritating. Couldnt there be a way to give certain members a way around that? Myself and a few other members are very active with spam reporting and its only hindering that not helping it

 

Honestly, it's not an issue. You see spam this much? probably on forum way too much

 

I've been coming to the forums daily for years, and it's gone from seeing one spam thread a month to several a day.

Either there's a lot more spam, or you've gotten a lot worse at handling it.

So please don't "it's not an issue" it? The spam level is somewhat unique to Unity's forums, and it does hurt the perception of the moderation quality. It's also really annoying when I'm seeing that there's new activity in a subforum I care about, and open it to find that it's Keto spam, again.

 

But because they're human, at some point they do give up.

There are several strategies for detection (these go in mod queue) but they have become more devious at it and the best Unity could do is improve their flagged for mod queue detection....

Which is in need (imho) of an update. But again I've not seen more recently than what happens all the time except perhaps at a different time of day than you'd normally log in. I think that's mostly their (human) tactic at the moment.

Sadly this is a case of exploited labour more than bots and we've had far worse months without complaints. It's generally going to be the time of day for a given spammer group.

So yep, you're seeing a problem but the amount of user pain is minimal at best, and this problem usually will shift from month to month, to a different time of day. If that's when you're active the most you'll see it the most. But from my end, I'm not seeing more, just a change of when it occurs, and this will change again.

This is my 2p, and I'm sorry if I sounded dismissive. I'm really not, but I tend to burst through my activities without realising how I come across. Sorry @Baste and others !

 

I would simply just be aware that we are still working on this - it's not as easy as it sounds in combatting spam. I am definitely annoyed with the amount of spam that is coming to the forums but as Hippocoder says, the user pain is not that significant. Regardless of the lack of user pain, I want it gone and I am working on this.

Please remain possible and keep doing your reports if you have the time, as this gives me fuel to speed things up.

 

here's a new and interesting kind of spam:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/itween-valueto.62448/

If you haven't deleted it yet, there's two bots. The second one just posts "thanks for the information, here's a spam link". The first one has quoted another user, and replaced the legit links in the original post with spam links.

 

Yes, I will remain 'possible'.

I will also try to remain 'positive' too

 

Hey folks, apologies for the necro - I wanted to put an update out to say that we've pushed through a minor change this morning which I hope should put an end to the spam. Please continue to use the report button and let me know if you folks notice a visible reduction. I'll be keeping a close eye too.

 

Another necro (edit: sorry, just saw the newer thread by neginfinity), but I've reported 4 spam threads in the last week or so.

You might automatically flag threads or posts by "new" users (less than X posts perhaps) that include hyperlinks (or more than 1 or 2 hyperlinks). You might make this a bit more complex by generating a list of all hyperlinks on the forum, and flagging when the link is to a site not on the list (or with fewer than X entries on the list), so that "pussy8080.net" gets flagged (which I saw yesterday).