When forum spam escapes into news feeds

gaekwad · 2014-11-07 18:53:13

Thinking about this further, one of the main reasons that this place is a spammer target is the absence of nofollow in the outgoing links. If that was to change, it’d make spamming here far less attractive.

Are there historical reasons why nofollow is absent? Are there good reasons to keep it that way?

gaekwad · 2014-11-07 18:55:21

uli wrote #285550:

Alright, split done. Pete, please feel free to name the topic to your liking/in perfect English/write a more appropriate introduction/etc., after all you’ve made the first post ;)

Done. The temptation to also shoehorn a joke punchline in and leave everyone confused was very tempting.

michaelkpate · 2014-11-07 19:04:43

gaekwad wrote #285555:

That’s my understanding. Twitterfeed does the same every 15 minutes, at least it did the last time I checked.

Twitterfeed actually offers multiple choices – from 15 minutes to several hours.

ingleslenobel · 2014-11-07 20:22:25

Is there no way to control the problem at the source? Ie prevent spammers registering and posting? Have you considered making the forum “manual approval” before joining, surely there can’t be that many non-spammers joining every day?

Edit – or parse for a URL in the first post and just keep those in an approval queue as a starter?

Last edited by ingleslenobel (2014-11-07 20:27:35)

colak · 2014-11-07 20:37:06

I guess, because of my time zone, I am one of the first who checks and deletes the spam in the forum. I found that the big wave comes at around 6am GMT as at 5am GMT there is normally nothing.

philwareham · 2014-11-07 23:01:00

I’ve upped the RSS feed cache (in the forum) to 60 minutes, that might help slightly.

If twitterfeed offers better controls than feedburner is say go with that instead.

Regarding nofollow, FluxBB doesn’t allow anything in settings to prevent that. Although, we use Textile, so maybe that could be patched into the code. If Jukka was around he could probably answer that one.

gaekwad · 2014-12-14 17:49:36

I’ve put a proposal together here – it looks like a couple of files can be edited to achieve the nofollow-ness.

wet · 2015-01-08 08:06:54

I have now banned registrations from email addresses provided by this particular service. This might help a bit.

wet · 2015-01-14 05:14:12

There is hope: Franz yesterday mentioned the possibility of anti-spam plugins in the next release of FluxBB, due circa next week.

philwareham · 2015-01-14 09:27:53

wet wrote #287343:

There is hope: Franz yesterday mentioned the possibility of anti-spam plugins in the next release of FluxBB, due circa next week.

Well, I’ve got a theme update to push out for the forum too, so that is good. I’ll investigate – although I thought plugins weren’t coming until FluxBB v2.0. Can you link to the post by Franz about this?

wet · 2015-01-14 09:40:02

philwareham wrote #287352:

Can you link to the post by Franz about this?

There’s no post, just a bit of private chat with him. I think he suffers personally under the same chore, if you take the spam volume at his own testbed forum as an indication.

Let’s see how it goes. Having the opportunity to add plugins does necessarily give us working code to combat spam.

colak · 2015-01-14 12:54:39

philwareham wrote #287352:

Can you link to the post by Franz about this?

Would this be it?

philwareham · 2015-01-14 13:04:53

colak wrote #287357:

Would this be it?

Thanks, I’ll keep an eye on the GitHub discussions.

wet · 2015-01-27 13:58:09

Through a Rube-Goldbergish construction involving this forum’s feed, an instance of Tiny Tiny RSS and its “Republish feed items” feature, and Feedburner I am now moderating which forum posts appear in txpforum’s timeline.

This costs actually less effort than the previous method of deleting embarrassing tweets there. \o/

gaekwad · 2015-01-27 14:01:22

Bravo.

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#16 2014-11-07 18:53:13

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

#17 2014-11-07 18:55:21

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

uli wrote #285550:

#18 2014-11-07 19:04:43

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

gaekwad wrote #285555:

#19 2014-11-07 20:22:25

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

#20 2014-11-07 20:37:06

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

#21 2014-11-07 23:01:00

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

#22 2014-12-14 17:49:36

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

#23 2015-01-08 08:06:54

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

#24 2015-01-14 05:14:12

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

#25 2015-01-14 09:27:53

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

wet wrote #287343:

#26 2015-01-14 09:40:02

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

philwareham wrote #287352:

#27 2015-01-14 12:54:39

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

philwareham wrote #287352:

#28 2015-01-14 13:04:53

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

colak wrote #287357:

#29 2015-01-27 13:58:09

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

#30 2015-01-27 14:01:22

Re: When forum spam escapes into news feeds

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