Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Using a Sandbox To Deal With Spambots?
shellster_dude writes "Slashdot is certainly no stranger to the problem of spam bots. While blocking a spam bot may seem like the best solution, it is likely that the spammer will simply re-register with a different name. While trying to solve this dilemma on my own forums, I had an epiphany. What if, instead of blocking a spam bot, I could mark a spammer, and then hide all their comments from everyone else? The spammer could continue to go their merry way, spamming to their heart's content. When they visit the forum, they see their spam comments correctly placed in the threads, but their comments would only be visible to them. Thus, an effective sandbox which would prevent them from registering a new user once they had been 'blocked.' Are any other Slashdotters familiar with this technique? Does any software currently use this technique?"
Old idea that doesn't fix much because spammers change accounts after 1-20 posts anyway.
This comment is used extensively at major media outlets such at Swedish' tabloid "www.aftonbladet.se." Facebook is used to register users.
When a user is perceived as spamming - or writing opinions that are unwelcome - the user is marked, and simply not displayed to other visitors. But the user himself does not know, and keeps spamming.
Evil. Pure evil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbanning
Reddit does something like this.
The practice goes by several other names I can't recall, but I know it as a "shadow ban"
Basically, you tick a box and nobody but that poster can see their nonsense.
Some forum software already includes the feature, others require a plugin or a roll-your-own solution.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Because it will be trivial for a spammer to check his posts from another account?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Steve Huffman, one of the creators of Reddit, talks about this exact solution during his Udacity class, Web Application Engineering. http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs253/CourseRev/apr2012 I think it was during week 4 "Whom to Trust," but I don't have links to the exact video. So in short, yes, it has been done effectively in the past, though I believe they wrote their own code to do it.
Replace the forum's captcha with one of a higher grade, e.g. Recaptcha
Or eliminate it altogether, since it doesn't help and really pisses off users.
Requiring new users to be registered and await activation before being able to post.
Instead of this allow anyone to post right away, but do not allow the first few posts to be seen until they have been verified to be valid by a human. Delegate some of this verification to your most active users.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The really important thing is to make sure Google (and the other search engines and ad services, if you care about them) can't see the spam. That's the real objective of the spammers, and those that bother checking may find that spamming you is less effective in fixing their page ranks.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This technique is widely used against trolls on various Internet forums. It is often called 'Hellbanning'
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.
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Recently, there was a spate of spam on slashdot about antivirus software. IIRC, in a single day there were eight instances/variants of the same spam on a single discussion alone [and more on other discussions on the same day]. Different spiels, accounts, AC's.
Such aggressive spamming can [realistically] only be dealt with by the site itself (e.g. filtering by content). The content trigger was probably easy, as each spam message would feature the product name no less than 10 times.
I haven't seen the particular spam recently, so I'm guessing something was done about it.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there