there are many new posts and all in a foreign language but i believe that its from people spamming the same thing. is there anyway to control people or bots from spamming things on this forum?
It’s Korean, stupid advertisements. Same thing happened last week. They were promoting the boxing fight. :(…
sigh, I keep the forums sight open on my laptop because I enjoy reading all the new threads and comments ( I swear I have read just about every single thread and comment posted on this forum for the past month) but now I might just have to keep it closed because I’m getting annoyed at all the spamming as I never know when its a legitimate post or just spam.
I guess no forum is immune to spammers, but i was hoping that the Inventables team would not have to deal with floods like the current one. They are already work on so many things.
Time to introduce CAPTCHA or equivalent during account registration. This is getting huge.
skip the CAPTCHA, just start blocking IP groups.
Yeah, the forum is almost unusable through all that mess for the moment. Have to wait until it gets cleaned up, I can’t even find new topics in all that garbage. 
Hey guys,
Sorry about the spam. First time dealing with it! We have started blocking IP addresses. Will update when the cleanup is complete.
We got all the spam deleted and related IP addresses banned. We also increased the amount of time you have to spend on the site before posting, increased the rate limits on posting and made the threshold for auto-banning people lower.
6 Likes
Looks a heck of a lot better! I’ve seen some fairly serious spam before, but that was about the biggest single flood I’ve ever seen! Hopefully, those measures will take care of it. 
Oh yeah, they’re back like crazy. Damn, what a mess!
it seems as if they are using different accounts and different ip addresses to avoid the ip blocking, they pretty much using bots. and the inventables team needs help, They need to stay focused on packing and shipping our machines out, not dealing with hackers and spammers all day long. This is just becoming a nuisance for everyone.
Agh. This is very annoying. We are back on spam duty 
Looks nice and tidy again! Spambots are kind of the bane of all forums, can you add some kind of anti-flood thing for accounts? Heck, or depending on how versatile the software is, ban any user that makes more than two posts in a week using entirely that particular character set?
One thing we just did is turn up the rate limits for new users posting. That way at least there won’t be a flood of hundreds of posts by the same user.
One interesting setting that this forum allows is a minimum “entropy” on the content of a post. That is, it has to have some variation and can’t just be the same letter repeated. Looking at the spam, it seems to use a lot of repeated content.
Interesting… Can it operate based on comparative posts by the same user? Where it looks at two posts, and can say “Oh, hey, this is a bot copy-pasting the same text to another post!”
Interesting idea! I think that it can do something like “identical post detection” where it won’t let you post a topic that has the same name as another. Not sure about anything beyond that though.
Most sites use CAPTCHA for this reason. It is very effective. I am happy to volunteer to try and implement it for you if you need the help.
2 Likes
Hi Everyone, thanks for the help flagging. We had four people deleting users and all the posts they had posted. It was thousands if not tens of thousands of spam posts from multiple accounts.
It should be all cleaned up now.