Forum Spam from South Korea

[MikeNewYork]

Miraculously, all the spam has disappeared.

[tzfujimino]

I think ems and Rover have dealt with it.
Thank you for your efforts, ems and Rover.

[MikeNewYork]

All hail ems and Rover.

[Esredux]

The spammers are back in a big way tonight. I think I agree with you that the deletion power needs to be expanded so that different time zones are covered. I would be happy to participate.

It could be not necessarily just delition, though.

I have never run a site and might well be wide of the mark. (sorry if that's the case, just ignore it)

Probably due to my current location, I think I am among those who will bump into spammers first and have to wait till someone comes online and cleans the whole mess. I also noticed that during such attacks the number of people online (members and guests) usually goes down, sometimes quite drastically. And it's easy to understand why: for a second language student it can take forever to wade through all those fake threads, so many would probably give up.

Could there be any forum option/s to protect decent users, like adding spammers to one's ignore list? For me it didn't work as it didn't eliminate their threads from the 'what's new' page. For the same reason reporting such threads didn't help either. I assume I might have overlooked reporting users with all their threads at once or anything more efficient.

I was also wondering what if newcomers had any time limitations, like 1-2 new threads a day or till the first comment from a moderator or something similar?

Many thanks for all your time and effort you put into this site - it's priceless.

[emsr2d2]

Generally, in the mornings before work, I don't have time (or the brain cells) to answer actual questions but I can whoosh my way through a whole load of spam-o-maticking and will continue to do so until (hopefully) the attacks come to an end!

This must be a complete nightmare for you, Red5, so thanks for all your hard work trying to shut it down.

[MikeNewYork]

Yes, many thanks to Red5.

[Red5]

I was also wondering what if newcomers had any time limitations, like 1-2 new threads a day or till the first comment from a moderator or something similar?

Thanks for the suggestion. I've now changed the forum so that the first posts from new members are moderated. It's unlikely to be 100% perfect, but hopefully this will help us catch more of this spam before it appears on the public site.

Many thanks for all your time and effort you put into this site - it's priceless.

Thank you very much! All of our staff here are volunteers and they work very hard to keep things running smoothly. Comments like this make all the difference!

[Tdol]

Thanks. Let's see how effective these measures are. This is the first time they have got round the block with significant numbers of posts- we've only had a few minor cases of them getting through from machines in other countries in the last couple of weeks.

[Esredux]

It's unlikely to be 100% perfect, but hopefully this will help us catch more of this spam before it appears on the pubic site.

And I suspect it might be very time-consuming as well. Fingers crossed it won't last long.

[Tdol]

Let's hope it doesn't, but I have my doubts.