Spammer army

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stan_qaz
Omniscient Kiwi
Location: Gilbert, Arizona
Posts: 8671
Joined: Fri Jul 25, 2008 5:13 am

Spammer army

Thu Nov 24, 2011 9:49 am

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/11/23/0 ... -the-march
An article at the Physics arXiv blog about what's called the "Internet Water Army," large groups of people in China who are paid to "flood" internet sites with comments and reviews about various products. Researchers at the University of Victoria went undercover to figure out exactly how these informational (or disinformational) floods operate, and what they learned (PDF) could lead to better spam-detection software.
Might turn into a new tool at some point that would tag these folks.

I'd like to see a simple add-on to the forum software here that didn't let new users post links until they were approved by an admin.
I am not a Firetrust employee just a MW user.
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rusticdog
Firetrust Monkey
Posts: 15864
Joined: Mon Jun 13, 2005 6:27 pm

Re: Spammer army

Thu Nov 24, 2011 11:12 pm

Just block China from accessing the forum :thumbsup Life got a lot easier when we did that.


Still get the odd spambot coming from eastern europe or where ever, but nothing like it was. We don't have any features enabled requiring Admin approval as that allws the forums to run more or less on their own without us having to over manage. That's why I'm so slow removing spammers though too, I forget there is a forum moderation section :)

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