Spamming the forums

[grberk 26]

I started to follow a few of these forums at the forum level. Big mistake. I've been inundated with forum spam every morning. Can't you guys setup some sort of system to approve new forum posts before they get posted live? I like getting notified of new posts to the forum, but not when 50 of them came in over night, advertising "Mumbai call girls". Can't someone do anything to tighten the security here?

[GrumpyMonkey 4,316]

hi. it would be nice if we could. this discussion has happened before, and there doesn't seem to be any way to stop it unless we force new users to get approved, something that is also less than ideal with so many new users every day.

[Wern 244]

Yes, EN is aware of this problem and does what it can to minimize it.

This forum is monitored 24 hours by mods and we do clean up "by hand" those spams that the automatic forum software filters are missing. Just with "normal" spam on your private e-mail though, no system exists that can take care of this problem automatically and reliably.

 

This EN forum is big now and therefore "worthwhile" for spammers. If they can get a few clicks out of it, they are happy campers.

 

Please be assured that EN is aware of this and the issue is constantly monitored and discussed.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Related:

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/49929-tons-of-spam-in-forums/

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/59473-why-so-much-spam-on-the-forum/

 

 

Note, this is a problem, and moderators and staff are aware of it. However, this is not just a problem isolated to the Evernote community. Check out the Apple Support Community before most of North America wakes up, and sort posts with newest on top. Their spam puts EN to shame. 

[grberk 26]

So you can't just have someone moderate new posts before making them public? That would keep them from going live right away. If you're already in there checking posts for spam, you could just be checking whether or not a post is legtitmate, and then make it public if it is.

[Metrodon 2,183]

This is mainly a user moderated board, we do our best but there are no guarantees that one of us is always about. 

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

So you can't just have someone moderate new posts before making them public? That would keep them from going live right away. If you're already in there checking posts for spam, you could just be checking whether or not a post is legtitmate, and then make it public if it is.

EN employees often get days off. The evangelists (mods) are volunteers. Although the board is monitored though out the day/night/weekends, there is no one on 100% of the time. It would be a burden to have to inspect every single post and could slow down response time, if someone is online, trying to help someone else, who is online. The opinion seems to be it's best to have some users annoyed with the spam (and who are free to report it) than hold up a user who may be having a problem. Please feel free to use the report button, which will email all the mods. You only need to report one post for each spammer, not all of their posts.

[Wordsgood 526]

I into the same problem and it also seems to have opened a way past the spam filter on my Outlook email. I'm slowly getting that under control by marking those ones as Spam and/or Phishing, as well as blocking those email addresses.

Rather than follow threads now - unless by accicents when my finger gets trigger happy and hits "Follow this topic and I don't notice until more spam arrives via Evernote - I just log-in to the Forum now, head to the main board, and click each of the topic areas of interest to me. Then I open all the new threads with new posts since my last visit to the Forum.

I used to just click on "New Content" but found it brought too many threads that were not applicable to me.

Hope that helps. Cheers!