I despise bots

[Brophy]

grr bots

[Yack]

Wow what a mess what do you do to clean that up..... just delete them or is there like a block list on the Admin side?

[Kelfecil]

Wow what a mess what do you do to clean that up..... just delete them or is there like a block list on the Admin side?

Should be fairly easy on this type of forum. It's just a matter of an admin being around or not. It's a small forum so it makes sense if it takes some time before someone with the right forum privileges takes care of it. I know Kor is an admin but I don't know if he has anyone else helping him.

Nonetheless, should be all gone once Kor notices it.

Having said all of that, it is obnoxious and kind of sad that this still happens, especially to forums like this one since the people launching these bots gain absolutely nothing from doing this.

[Brophy]

Wow what a mess what do you do to clean that up..... just delete them or is there like a block list on the Admin side?

Should be fairly easy on this type of forum. It's just a matter of an admin being around or not. It's a small forum so it makes sense if it takes some time before someone with the right forum privileges takes care of it. I know Kor is an admin but I don't know if he has anyone else helping him.

Nonetheless, should be all gone once Kor notices it.

Having said all of that, it is obnoxious and kind of sad that this still happens, especially to forums like this one since the people launching these bots gain absolutely nothing from doing this.

BB, Guyra and Berk are the other moderators.

[BBShockwave]

Thanks for reporting it guys, I sadly get no pop-up or mail notification of it unless I click the reports icon (which so far, I didn't have to do often) but luckily I saw the report in Where to Buy (the forum highlights topics in dark blue if there is a report in there).
I have banned the spambot now and moved all the "Loli" topics (I shudder to think what those links would have led to... ) to Content Pending Removal.

Wow what a mess what do you do to clean that up..... just delete them or is there like a block list on the Admin side?

Yeah, we have the power to block users. Had to do it to some spambots in the past, but we have not seen this sort of spam in years.

[Kor]

Thanks for reporting the bots all, and thanks to mod team for banning and cleaning.

I have now changed the user registration password, which usually buys us another 4-5 months of no more spam.

[Yack]

Thanks again Kor and everyone.....

[Guyra]

Just got home and saw reports of spam posts. There were around 35 posts of the same kind by the username Martinideor. I've deleted them now. Not sure if the user reregistered, or wasn't properly banned? (I also banned the username before seeing this thread.)

[BBShockwave]

Odd, as I already banned him. But I noticed you can ban users despite them being already on the banned list. So that must have been it.
I moved his posts to the Content Pending removal instead of deleting them, since even when deleted, those topics show up to us mods. Plus I think Kor said everything in Content Pending Removal gets deleted after a set time?

[Guyra]

Odd, as I already banned him. But I noticed you can ban users despite them being already on the banned list. So that must have been it.
I moved his posts to the Content Pending removal instead of deleting them, since even when deleted, those topics show up to us mods. Plus I think Kor said everything in Content Pending Removal gets deleted after a set time?

That's probably it. I simply went through the list of posts they'd made, but didn't check where they were located. So I probably just deleted them from "content to be removed".

Was one that was still in the "What did you buy this week" thread, though. Deleted that and edited the post quoting it. I think all other posts were in threads started by that user. Either way their post count is now 0, so we can be sure nothing's been missed.

But I think it's a good idea to use the "content pending removal" category mainly for non spam posts. Because the category is intentionally open for everyone to see, that means crawlers also see it. Which means Google and other search engines register what's in there, and if they find a lot of links to sites with low PageRank that in turn lowers the PageRank of this site. It's generally not a problem with one spam post here and there that gets deleted ASAP, but if it stays for a long time it can become a problem - especially if it's a bunch of posts. And I don't know whether the deletion of posts in there is automatic or not, but the posts moved there are meant to stay long enough that the members of the community get to see why they were removed. Which in any case is more than long enough for crawlers to register the bad content and links. And search engines aren't so quick to unregister the info they've registered, and PageRank is easy to ruin, hard to rebuild.

A related suggestion, Kor: Can you make the "content pending removal" category open only to registered users? I don't think there's any value in letting guests have access to that category.