Discussion The forum is dying in spam

I heard that the CEO of Unity recently retired, will this cause any disruption at work? It's a shame to see a forum of the world's leading game engine flooded with spam.

https://forum.unity.com/forums/made-with-unity.11/

 

I mean the forum was maintained from community volunteers and most (all?) of them are pretty discouraged from the latest shenanigans.

If you are expecting someone from Unity to pick up the slack, don’t. If they outsource QA to the community they surely ain’t going to moderate their own forums.

 

I'm sad to see that the Made by Unity sub forum doesn't seem to get much attention, people seem to like posting awesome stuff using Unity on reddit.

 

I would say the engine is effectively dying in spam too at this point, so really the forums are pretty "on point"...

 

This problem has existed for at least 5 years and has never been properly addressed.

 

Just report them, they are easy to clean up. Most of the time the spam filters catch them. But... from time to time the bots improve and get in. It really no different than it usually is.

 

while it does seem you can easily pick a time to find a ton of spam, the mods do get rid of them. so, its not dying in spam because id expect all those are gone. There do seem a few things that could be done to limit the amount of spam they get to post, such as if they post every 1-2 minutes and never reply to anything, to put all their stuff on hold, but then that can be argued that would just make comment spam and thats even more annoying.

 

You can only report one per minute or so, that is too slow, let users report multiple

 

Unfortunately, the constantly adapt and tweak. The web will update the filters, and in a few months spammers have a new tactic.

Sadly the new tactic is only post one or two posts, but instead create hundreds of new accounts. (with different ip addresses). And one of the things the team doesn't want to do is be discouraging but being too restrictive on first posts (first impressions and all that). So... tweaks to the filter will come eventually.

 

Feel free to just report one and say [insert forum here] is full of them. Just point us to where the mess is. You don't need to report all of them.

 

That isn't entirely accurate. Most of the other mods have reduced their time long before recent stuff. (it gets discouraging after awhile and has nothing to Unity.. the company or product) Personally, I was ambivalent to the changes... they very obviously were going to change/revert. And the staff MASSIVELY stepped up during that, they were working the forums, and many were directly engaging, which could not have been easy.

 

i still see accounts posting every 1-2 minutes for like 20+ minutes.. i wasnt suggesting blocking them after say 4 or 5, but once they get to 10+ or more in < 20 mins when they arent replying to anything, does suggest misuse of forums.

 

Spam's always been a problem for forums. Even the biggest ones I've been on with a veritable fleet of moderators running the best forum software could never keep it reasonably in check.

That said, the forum could use a few more moderators to cover more time zones.

 

People keep suggesting that a team of humans need to monitor things and inspect the messages that just isn't how one takes care of automated spamming. The site and the servers don't exist as an afterthought, someone "owns" it both figuratively and literally. Time for the VP or senior manager to assign someone with DB administration skills this simple task.

The goal isn't to catch all spam when inundated with huge amounts of spam, it is to catch the obvious "who posts 60 messages in the first few minutes after they joined" type of spam. The puddles can be mopped up after the flood subsides.

 

It is actually slightly easier if you report the thread. When a user is reported it is a few extra steps to investigate. We have a tool that cleans up spammers, so from a single post, we can clean up all their actions.

 

A huge bulk of the spam is actually caught or prevented, and the web team does take feedback and updates the filter when needed. There are lots of ways to spam that aren't able to be automated. And, it is important to note, that they don't let the board software to any automatic removal, only prevention. If a bot manages to post a bunch of spam, it may be prevented from continuing, but needs a human to remove the existing, which is very reasonable. The software also get s false positives, all that stuff is queued and gets checked. It's really not a big deal or problem. Sites get spam, we clean it up. It's a smaller percent of the clean up than what real humans say and do.

 

Hey, Unity feature, the bare minimum is there and then it requires a S*** ton of manual labor to do something half-decent with it.

[edit] And I almost forgot, double Unity-feature... they won't fix it because the new one is under way already, which will be much worse, but shiny looking, at least.

 

Then is almost certainly destined to get worse. Simple automation tools can generate an email address, respond to whatever confirmation is needed and post hundreds of emails from servers around the world. Let them be filled with links to infected downloads and you can deal with the bad press when it shows up in the news.

Wouldn't "terms of service" cover your ability to quarantine messages? If there is a dispute the person who posts 60 messages in 60 seconds (and who violated the terms they agreed to) can request they be restored. Your system could generate an email to the email of record notifying them of their violation. When that email bounces that could constitute another violation.

I am really not trying to tell you how to run things I (and others) are explaining that our day-to-day use is being affected by what is going on. If your current rules don't suffice it is time to revisit the rules. Companies revisit rules, pricing and all sorts of things regularly. We all get notices (including you I'd think) of "changes in our terms of service" so change them so you can better automate the process.

 

This is a case of "ease of reporting and time to respond". A spammer could adjust his software to report several users and threads while posting the spam. How long will it take "the review board" to visit each of the "cases" and to make a determination? I doubt the problem is going to go away.

 

Seriously. Hire me to (re)teach people how to write a regex... I'm not sure how legit forum thread would contain
"mephedrone crystal for sale" or "WhatsApp +13232089420" phrases here.

 

the non english ones should auto get put on a check list surely? I thought this board was english only

 

No, this site is NOT English only, it is open to everyone. It is encouraged that you post in English only because you much better chance of getting a response, but it is not a requirement. In fact one the better practices I have seen folks do is post their questions in both the original language and translated. The upshot there is that the majority can read it, and the untranslated content is there if there is a translation issue.

 

Ah fair enough - I could have sworn i saw a post in english or dont bother response to something not in english (obviously) .. i dont mind if people post in their natural language - after all most browsers auto translate these days, enough at least to get an idea of the question

 

I will bet every one of these threads turns into "better scanning of the content" and this one has gone this way as well worrying about translations. Please look at the example posted in the original message (and view the page listing each time you see a spam attack). There are accounts posting multiple messages within minutes to the same category and/or other categories. It isn't about being in Thai or English.

I will try again, "it is a brand new account created on the day that a large number of new messages are created (and no messages have been read)"

I don't see anything reasonably happening so I'll have to unsubscribe from these types of threads. When it gets worse we can have another gripe thread.

 

as you say, it seems really odd that this kind of behavior, even if it didnt say call girl etc, if someone posted this many threads with all but identical subjects and so on, even if it was about how their collossal typo'd code wasnt working - its still arguably spam, because no one needs to post so many of the same thing even if it was a few different forums.

 

The team is wrong about this. The team has always been wrong about this. Everybody will understand "this is your first post, it'll be checked for spam before being set live". Nobody, including long-timers, understands why Unity can't manage to not have half the page on the 2D forums be ads for prostitutes in the UAE, when that's seemingly not a problem on any other forums we frequent.