General > General Technical Chat

Using VPNs for "privacy" on forums, and forum spammers

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Zero999:
I'd be wary of using AI to block nasty posts, because most of the time on this forum, they're about shoddy software, poor products, crappy companies etc. There are countless nasty posts about Microshaft & Winblow$ 10. Would your AI bot ban someone who said the scumbag who developed the Office 360 user interface should be stonned to death? It might be better at detecting pointless posts and obvious spam.

An obvious use of automation is to detect duplicate posts and copy, pasting. I don't know whether automatically banning duplicate posters should be done though. Often newcommers think it's okay, as they think they'll reach a wider audiance if they create the same thread in different sections and it has happened before acidentally. Perhaps such a ban could be temporary, with a message telling the user why they've been banned, for how long and how to appeal it, if they think it's a mistake.

peter-h:
Many forums prevent duplicate posts if consecutive, not least because that is a common issue with submitting new posts if the connection is a bit dodgy.

But checking all the back through the thread for duplicate posts would be a new one :)

But I think, fundamentally, there is no solution to forum spam unless you manually approve all new signups. If you do that, it is pretty easy. One simple tip for admins: look at pre-signup activity and if there isn't any (i.e. negligible reading of the forum) then don't approve it. Almost no real person behaves like that, but 99% of spammers do. BUT you need to approve new signups quickly (not hours later) otherwise most will be lost for ever (people have a short attention span these days).

This wasn't a problem 10 years ago but today it is really big. Especially with fake passports / fake IELTS / etc being such a big thing.

DrG:
The attack-adjust dynamics of admin/user vs spammer is interesting to me and I appreciate the content in the thread. Of course, I immediately start thinking about where it is going.

Just some thoughts...

It seems like most of the processes in the thread seem to involve automated pre-moderation based on some pattern recognition. That is, excepting perhaps message #20, I am not seeing much on the automation of spam identification after the fact. Why is this? IOW, it seems like shuffling off identified spam into an invisible (to normal users) bin for later processing (a few seconds to days as per resources) where it would be returned to its posting status or deleted. Is it common and just has not been mentioned or is it too difficult or something else?

For example, many (most or all) email clients will sort out junk mail. Even to the extent of automated removal after XXX days. Of course you can see it and various places will remind you to 'look into your junk mail folder for our email and add us to your ok lists' or some such message.

The SME, or at least subject matter familiarity, captcha was mentioned, but wouldn't this simply be a matter of time before it no longer worked? That is, automated answers to such captchas would seem like they would only require some additional 'knowledge data bases'.

I am amazed at some of the bots I see on places, including here, and I am assuming, perhaps erroneously, that they are bots. Perhaps I simply lack vision but I don't see the justification for that much effort for such poor performance (maybe I just have not suspected the good ones).

I used to enjoy thwarting the phone spammers by blocking the numbers. I would check the effectiveness by not blocking some and see if they would call a second time. Now, they never call a second time. Apparently phone lines  (and IDs) are cheap enough to be never-the-same-twice. Now I am much closer to having an allow list (for deciding if I will answer)...something that the forums already use with a minimum number of posts and something that the spammers strive to defeat.

VPNs are offered as part of packages of anti-virus software (two large vendors come to mind). People may use them because they paid for them and feel like they have to get their money's worth and believe the hype.

I went back and read my response to a thread we had a while ago about the future of online discussion https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/the-future-of-online-discussion-how-do-you-see-it/msg2899818/#msg2899818 I have not changed much as far as how I feel about it.

peter-h:
Web forums grew rapidly ~2000 onwards. Everybody who knew PHP and a database knocked one up. And people were desperate for online participations and flooded these sites.

Today, web forums struggle because their success needs people who can read and write and who have time to participate usefully.

These people are still around but many, especially the young, are being lost to "instant satisfaction" / "one liner" places like facebook, twatter, instagram, and such.

The fact that these sites are useless for archiving knowledge, and anyway almost nobody bothers to post anything informative there, doesn't concern most people.

Then there is a lot more nastiness around. The online world has become generally nastier. This is a problem largely because everybody who comes to a web forum today has been on FB etc where nastiness is pretty much the default, and they expect to be able to do the same on the web forum. They then have to be dealt with by the mod(s) and often they don't like that.

Usenet used to be brilliant but has mostly gone under the weight of spam, and few people having a decent client for reading it.

The forum I run is modded for zero personal attacks (which is rare, and could not be done if we had adverts because kicking and biting threads bring a lot more advert clicks) and ~98% of the regular group has always been good. But over the 10 years it's been going we have had some "moments" :) I have few regrets except that troublemakers should have been removed much faster. The big tech forums in the US remove them instantly and there is a lesson to learn there.

Quality online discussion will continue on quality well managed sites like this one, which have an educated audience. There it can survive. Once you get away from specialised subjects, to mundane stuff, it is a struggle and most of that will probably end up on FB where everybody has created a forum :)

Someone mentioned stopping search engines going in. That is absolutely not a good idea because good SEO is key to a forum collecting new people, to replace those who left, died, etc. Web forums still get the best SEO.

What is changing is the spammer landscape, because there are high value commodities they can sell. The next one will be fake vaccine passports, but I think the govts are onto that because everybody knows one of them will easily be worth 3 or 4 figures.

David Hess:

--- Quote from: peter-h on May 06, 2021, 06:29:39 am ---Do "normal people" use a VPN routinely for forum browsing? If so, what is the point, for non illegal activities?
--- End quote ---

I used a paid VPN by default.

Besides frustrating the data harvesting of my ISP, it allows the secure use of WiFi hotspots.  Doing otherwise is an invitation to disaster.

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