Is anyone actually still taking care of CG?

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Wanna hear something funny? There's over 4000 posts waiting for approval. Well, there goes that idea out of the window.

Wait, what?? You mean we already implemented it?

[McDuffies]

Yep. Half of these spam messages, I see with green sign on top. I dunno how it looks from other accounts, but there's like five new pages of spam, both waiting for approval and ordinary, on every topic. First day, 200 new requests for approval. Second day, 400. Next two days, 2000 each.

One of admins is on it though, since I see someone's been tampering with the approval panel, trying to make it more functional.

You know what I noticed? 90% of spam messages have subject entered. On the other hand, most of real users don't enter subject, so I assume bots are written to fill out every form field they find.
That's an intriguing thought.

[IVstudios]

I only see one spam post in this thread (well, on the lost two pages of it, anyway) .I knew the spam was bad, but I had no idea it was 4,000 post in a few days bad.

Can you bulk-delete all a users post from the "waiting for approval" list like you can from normal threads? That might make it less daunting. Or are all 4,000 from unique users?

[McDuffies]

I only see one spam post in this thread (well, on the lost two pages of it, anyway) .I knew the spam was bad, but I had no idea it was 4,000 post in a few days bad.

Can you bulk-delete all a users post from the "waiting for approval" list like you can from normal threads? That might make it less daunting. Or are all 4,000 from unique users?

They are unique users, and it's like yangzhongge3, yangzhongg51, yangzhongge3, yangzhongg65 ,yangzhongg27... Mod panel is a bit erratic so search doesn't always work the way it should (so it doesn't help to, for instance, search for all posts in GD). Till today, I could only disaprove 5 posts at a time, but one of the admins tampered with it so now it's something like 20 posts at a time - even with that I didn't have time to clean half of it today.

The worst thing is that with any bulk disproving, risk of rejecting every real user along with the false ones grows.

[IVstudios]

Can you ban by IP? Even if the bots are making multiple users, they should all be coming from the same IP address, right? (I'm just guessing, I don't really know) Do an IP ban on one yangzhongg## and it should get rid of them all.

[McDuffies]

Can you ban by IP? Even if the bots are making multiple users, they should all be coming from the same IP address, right? (I'm just guessing, I don't really know) Do an IP ban on one yangzhongg## and it should get rid of them all.

It's not necessarily a rule, I suppose the same program might operate from different machines it hijacked with a trojan. In any case, it doesn't solve the problem of how to delete several hundreds of such accounts, and the the next day you have several thousands of spammers from different ip.

[IVstudios]

Ug. Well, I'm out of ideas then.

Damn spammers. They just don't play fair.

[Aeridus]

Again, the mods I mentioned should help... it cross references all IPs with a known spammer database and lets you ban all existing users that are found to be spammers in a minute.

[peterabnny]

Too bad there isn't a macro saying potential members with non-actual names get denied. Seems like all the spammers that make it through have names like "kehbsh" or "ejnther." Hell, having a macro to weed out foreign language spammers would at least take care of all the Russian posters.

[McDuffies]

Ug. Well, I'm out of ideas then.

Damn spammers. They just don't play fair.

There's that bunch of plugins that was suggested earlier, but we need admins for that.

[Terotrous]

I think we may need to straight up shut down new user registration for a few days until we can get these plugins sorted out.

[Kisai]

I think we may need to straight up shut down new user registration for a few days until we can get these plugins sorted out.

I'll change it back to reCaptcha on monday. Right now I think the huge uptick in spam was due to black friday.

[IVstudios]

Whatever you're doing, it looks a lot better. It is much appreciated.

[McDuffies]

Whatever you're doing, it looks a lot better. It is much appreciated.

Word, I've only seen a few of them since the fix. Forums are back!

[Aeridus]

Woohoo! Uncle Ghastly's forums are spam-free again! Thanks Kisai!

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

It's like getting used to having lamps again after not having power for a while I can actually log in and see relevant things without digging vainly wondering if I missed someone's comment under all the spam!! Thanks Kisai!

[McDuffies]

And I can read forums without first having to clean them up.

[LibertyCabbage]

Yeah, thanks for getting things cleaned up. The forums are a lot more appealing now.

[K-Dawg]

It's too positive in here.

Kisai the work you did I would only grade as an A. You would have got an A+ if you made a shoutout to me.

[McDuffies]

Aw c'mon, give the girl a plus!