ALL THE SPAM and Thank you reporters!

Hey,

We've noticed an influx of spammy spammers on the forums recently and they seem to be real people, which makes things worse We are working on a solution for bots and people so that may suffer our wrath!

Thank you to everyone who has and continues to report posts, spam or otherwise, you are the best and we couldn't sort stuff out without you.

​

 

ok

 

Thanks from my side for the fast reaction time to thous reports.
Having the first side of the Unity-Support covered in unreadable junk is not fun ( in contrast to your posted image).

 

I've noticed that all the SPAM I've been reporting has been edited immediately. It seems like they're making a post that doesn't violate rules first, and then editing it in an attempt to avoid any automated systems.

Not sure if that's useful info to you, but I thought I'd mention it in case you hadn't noticed.

 

The times they are a-changin.

 

Interesting, no I did not, I'll check if the other mods have. You catch it again, try PMing me before and after shots. Thanks for the info!

 

I haven't actually seen the 'before', so I'm kind of making an assumption there. But every single one of them has had that 'edited' message at the bottom of the post, with the same exact time as the post.

 

That is odd. If they edit right after posting, though, the edited sign wouldn't show up unless a minute had passed before saving the edit. If it's automated it doesn't seem like it would take that long to edit the post. I have noticed the same, though.

 

Buy a cheap moden kitchen, viagra, mortgage house or binary trading consulting at rt information technology! I started doing 20 000€ working from home reading adds since i started!!!!

 

That was pretty convincing, enough so that someone reported it using the report post button.

--Eric

 

Seriously? Amazing lol

 

Most of the ones I'm reporting are also saying edited.

 

Have you considered adding mod_security and upgrade to Apache latest?



Our experience is that our game-forum has almost zero spam to date.

 

spammers as in bots ads, or something else?

 

I am guessing this is because the huge difference in size between your forum and unity forum.
Also, an automated tool is no match to a human spammer.

 

Basically, something or other - Aurore mentioned they were probably actual people - was creating a load of accounts to post threads like "Watch [Movie/TV series X] online here". Which of course is really going to tempt me

And now for more some spam - here's a can I made a few months ago

 

best post ever

 

I have reported a dozen just past few days. Seems like those spams are increasing dramatically. Unity needs to find a solution fast or this forum is going to drown in a sea of it!

 

By spam do you mean those posts with a long wall of links? Could just limit how many links an author is able to implement in a single post.

 

The most spam th i have seen where very long posts of mostly non Latin characters and some telephone numbers.

They mostly get posted in a time interval of round about a minute, thats by the anti flood protection of the forum.
I would make a filter that disable the right of posting if a user is posting like 3 or 6 times in the same forum selection in a very short period of time.
I do not think thats a problem tho make an Moderator or administrator check the post and enable / disable the account.

 

it used to be like this, but just yesterday I saw a more insidious variant - a user with 2 posts posted something like "hey I'm getting into unity - should we buy this book" (amazon link) - the book was programming-related but not Unity-specific. It's posts like these that are really hard cases but I report first and ask questions later.

 

Someone is at it again on the Support forum ... a full page again of spam (argh!)

 

Honestly. My friend helped run a pretty big forum once. He came up with a simple and elegant solution. All new user threads have to be approved by an admin for the first 2 or so threads they post. This put spam completely to a halt on his forum.

 

Better yet, don't let people register through the forums but only through unity's gui, would kinda kill all automated acct creation

 

no spam from me. non of that pink ooze. 100% organic, no additives or antibiotics. no factory farm just open range...

that is why i hate spam, it horrible tasting

i report all the spam immediately in hopes that it gets quickly removed and the account closed asap

but still that fridge guy comes back from time to time, caught em last night.

next time he shows up im going to have some fun... he he he

i was thinking of posting

the nsa got your message about the problems you are having with your fridge and they are sending their maytag repair drone right over...

that should get them to stop.

also, some sites dont let you create new threads until you have been around for a while. they do let you post in a thread, but then it sort of limits the spam. also they have live timer so many threads a minute and so many in a row. ect...

regardless its hard i would imagine..

 

Don't do this please. It won't do a thing to get them to stop since spammers don't ever read replies, and just increases the visibility of the spam. Just stick to clicking the report post button.

--Eric

 

not a problem, i was just joking ... thought it was funny to say here. since we are all scratching our heads about it. it is hard to keep cleaning up. you see it everywhere, i mean other websites, not this one as much cause its very well moderated. non of them ever post why they do it. im not sure what the point of the posts since i cant even read them. and the ones i can read i cant see anyone buying into it. sort of disrespectful / inconsiderate. perhaps some generic defect causing some yet to be named disease/affliction. sort of like chronic dysfunctional posting syndrome, C.D.P.S for short. that oneday hopefully in the not too distant future they would have figured this part of our generic code and create a test and a vaccine that would stop it.

 

Hey, since this topic is back up and I was wondering all the time, Ifigured I shall ask in here.
Unity people keep saying "it's enough to report the person and not each spam post"
However hard I searched I could never find the "Report User" button.
Is this some sort of urban myth and there is no such button ? Or am I again too blind to see the obvious ?

 

It's the icon below the avatar that looks like a warning sign. If you mouse over it, it says "report post".

--Eric

 

It should require a small portion of Unity Script code, like print the first 5 to the power of 2 numbers then print "Unity Rocks!", should stop all spam, MMO threads, and just usual derps.(Have the community come up with a new one each week )

 

very interesting... reminds me what about for new users to make them for first n post prove that they are human by having some catcha / simple math problems like ive seen on some sites to prove it.

more evil ask them to go to unity manual certain method and look up the nth word in the description. old video games used to have something like this go to page n in our manual and type the 5th word...

even more evil would be to have them solve some more difficult math problems, like

Prove that 10 is a solitary number.

in case someone wants to find out what a solitary number is basically...

"a number which does not have any friends." (so very sad)

here read more about such an unhappy number...

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. Solitary Number
3.  
4. A number which does not have any friends. Solitary numbers include all primes, prime powers, and numbers for which (n,sigma(n))=1, where (a,b) is the greatest common divisor of a and b and sigma(n) is the divisor function. The first few numbers satisfying (n,sigma(n))=1 are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 16, 17, 19, 21, ... (Sloane's A014567). Numbers such as 18, 45, 48, 52, 136, 148, 160, 162, 176, 192, 196, 208, 232, 244, 261, 272, 292, 296, 297, 304, 320, 352, and 369 can also be easily proved to be solitary (Hickerson 2002).
5.  
6. Some numbers can be proved not to be solitary by finding another integer with the same index, although sometimes the smallest such number is fairly large. For example, 24 is friendly because (24,91963648) is a friendly pair. However, there exist numbers such as n=18, 45, 48, and 52 which are solitary but for which (n,sigma(n))!=1. It is believed that 10, 14, 15, 20, 22, 26, 33, 34, 38, 44, 46, 51, 54, 58, 62, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 76, 82, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 99, 104, 105, 106, and many others are also solitary, although a proof appears to be extremely difficult.
7.  
8. In 1996, Carl Pomerance told Dean Hickerson that he could prove that the solitary numbers have positive density, disproving a conjecture by Anderson and Hickerson (1977). However, this proof seems not to ever have been published (Hickerson 2002).
9.  

that will greatly reduce the number of posts...

 

I'm noticing the support forum is being overrun again, this time with a handful of different accounts. Maybe you could disable the amount of time it takes to report multiple things?

 

Make it stop!

 

This crap is so out of control...

 

I read Arabic and it seems that all of the span we are seeing on this forum is for stuff and services for businesses in Egypt. Not sure if that will help countering the problem but thought you should know.

 

The Arabic-speaking spambot mainly targets the Support forum, which I'm starting to think is because it's a support forum, i.e. whoever made it set it to look for any URLs which includes "Support" and post some links just in case somebody needs their dishwasher serviced in Egypt and is willing to trust an unsolicited link on some random forum on the Internet.

 

K, that's what I use, it just sounded as if there's a more general "report person" button that is hidden somewhere in the forum caves.