[SC] The unexplained SPAM

In the Game FAQ forum, general feedback tab; there seems to be a huge inundation of messages created very, very shortly after an account was set up.
I would have posted in that area, or, the Game Discussion/Feedback forum, but I do not have privileges for that.
Isn't there supposed to be a 'capcha' thing that prevents the auto account creation and subsequent spamming?

 

It's a combination of people and scripts that are doing it.

To explain it quickly there will be a person being paid to increase search rankings for something that somebody wants to advertise and sell. They do this by abusing how Google's search algorithm works - it basically scans the internet for how many times something is mentioned and then will display that as the top result as it is mentioned the most. That is a super dumbed down version of how it works but you get the idea.

So what this person then does is they will make accounts on various websites then once the account is made and in the forum they will activate a script they have wrote that will just spam the same messages over and over as quick as possible, which is what we have seen happen on this forum for many months now.
The person doing this does not care if the threads and such are deleted from the surface of the forum because what was said will still 'exist' in cached pages and such, which Google's algorithm still uses, so that is why this spam accounts keep on coming back almost every day.


It would be nice if an account had to enter a captcha every time they wanted to create a new thread but then if I were in the position of the guy who is doing this I would just change the script so that it replied to already made threads. Then if captchas were introduced for replies I would probably just integrate a captcha-solving server into the script. So it's a pretty hard thing to actually prevent from ever happening and the prevention methods are limited to whatever Xenforo (the forum software) has available.


Hopefully that sheds a bit of light on at least why it is happening, even if the solutions to stop it seem pretty grim ^^

 

Thanks Okapi32 !
I hope DarkOrbit/BigPoint can track the IP's back and maybe do a ban on them (but the spammer will or can sub in a different IP address).

The thread can close unless admins want to add to the reply.


...btw Okapi32; with all the reply work you do on these forums, when do you ever find the time to actually play the game?

 

Hello,

Thanks Okapi32 for picking this one up^^

There are some measures that support enacted to try and help address these spammers (the captcha as you mentioned, ]Coldheart[). Unfortunately, as Okapi pointed out, it's not always the fix-all

We're usually pretty on top of it (I think so anyway), but they do sometimes still catch us when we aren't here or available sometimes. Or sometimes we blink and there's fifty threads that just came to say hello >.>

Anyway, hope that helps. We aren't ignoring it or anything like that, just some days we're slower than others to send it all away

Regards,
-Closing as requested-