Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 11:51 am Post subject: Spam postings
I have noticed recently (especially this morning) that the number of postings by "Guest" that only contain a quote of a previous posting are increasing.
Via my searches in Google, I have found that Google has many links to this server with "mode=quote" as parameter. This makes me suspect that search engines and spam bots are posting these.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 11:04 pm Post subject:
Are these spam postings? I had been looking at them and not seeing any links or meta tags in them.
One solution, of course, is to restrict all anonymous postings, requiring folks to have a user account. I had been hoping to avoid doing that to the forums; I already had to disable it on the articles due to comment spam.
The only other solution would be to try and see if there's anyone who wants to run through and just happily delete them.
Is there anyway to tweak the php for the mode=quote posts to include a "noindex" or whatever just on those pages, so Google won't index them but will still index the regular-mode threads?
For some reason Google seems most fond of indexing/caching the useless pages like mode=quote. When the kiddies last took out the forums, I went searching through Google's cache to try and recover some of the key posts (esp the ones the FAQ linked too) and most of the results were mode=quote, which was not very useful....
Otherwise, I'm fond of cleanup and equally annoyed by the random "quote-posts"
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 11:43 pm Post subject:
OK, I just added in some stuff to the PHP that now requires a reasonable delay between when a reply page is sent and the reply can actually be submitted. In theory this should be a reasonable amount of time that it would take for a reply to be typed out.
The logic is that, being human, we type slowly. Bots don't type
Let's see if this helps reduce some of these spurious quotes. It should also help remove "accidental" submits by users who aren't familiar with the forum.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Feb 22, 2005 10:31 pm Post subject:
General note: since some folks have noticed dropped postings, I'm tweaking my fix so throttling only applies for anonymous users. Users with accounts should be able to post without having to wait past the timeout.
Ed, was that old logic also responsible for the "Submit" button working as the "Preview" button, if the message hadn't been previewed first?
Oscar noted this problem a while ago, but I mostly preview before hitting submit so I mostly didn't notice....
Edit: Oops, just saw your reply in the thread. What was odd is that when I did notice, they still were fairly lengthy posts or had taken some time to write; I expected the problem on short/quick posts, but they weren't. Regardless, the tweaks seem good so far
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 2:48 am Post subject: Re: Spam Postings
sardisson wrote:
Ed, was that old logic also responsible for the "Submit" button working as the "Preview" button, if the message hadn't been previewed first?
Edit: Oops, just saw your reply in the thread. What was odd is that when I did notice, they still were fairly lengthy posts or had taken some time to write; I expected the problem on short/quick posts, but they weren't. Regardless, the tweaks seem good so far
Smokey
I too ran into this tonight - I usually post as an anonymous user (yeah, yeah, I know). My replies tonight were reasonably thought out (and I even went and researched some stuff on the web). Maybe the time limit doesn't have to be quite so high.
Also I had a couple of occurrences when I pressed the Quote button or even the Submit button, all the server appeared to return to me was a blank page - I would then try back/forward page, and typically would have to repost the data no longer in cache. Yes, it might be this old broken web browser I am using, but I haven't experienced the problem before today, using the same browser. Maybe something needs checking.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 12:09 am Post subject:
OK Terry, I lowered the time for the throttling on the unlogged in posts. Let me know if that works.
There are also a couple of other potential cases that might result in that preview showing up instead of the post, such as if the IP changes inbetween the time the original page is sent and the submit occurs. I doubt that's the case, but just wanted to put that out there in case anyone else is experiencing problems...the timer may not be the only thing wrong
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