Spam users in the forum

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MDeen
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Spam users in the forum

Post by MDeen »

I noticed that there are a lot of spam users in the forum. Not per se users that spam messages, but just people that register, put a url in the description and leave it at that.
Wouldn it be an idea to start removing them? My guess is that it's about half of all users.
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Montgomery Burns
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Re: Spam users in the forum

Post by Montgomery Burns »

It was far worse some time ago when spammers actually posted spam, but yeah, if it helps the forum I agree.
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avij
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Re: Spam users in the forum

Post by avij »

We have a perfectly good "Forum feedback" subforum for these kinds of requests. I moved the topic here.

I've removed a few thousand such users recently, and I'm keeping my eye on the newly registered users and clean them up regularly, and I hope the other forum admins do the same. It's possible that there are still some older user accounts which should be removed, but locating them automatically is a bit of a problem. I've been thinking of removing all forum users that fulfill ALL of these:
  • Has not posted any public messages
  • Has not sent any private messages
  • Has not received any private messages
  • Latest login was between 1st January 2003 and 1st October 2012
  • Uses an email address that is not registered at EBT
  • Has an username that is not registered at EBT
  • Has not participated in any polls
  • Is a normal user; user_type in (0,1)
I believe getting rid of such ghost users wouldn't be particularly harmful.
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MDeen
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Re: Spam users in the forum

Post by MDeen »

My trigger for asking this was because I was searching for a user starting with T and noticed really large amounts of bogus users there. For instance on this page, is there more than one real user?

If you need help, I'd love to volunteer.
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avij
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Re: Spam users in the forum

Post by avij »

A large bunch of spam users was deleted some months after the above message, and now another large bunch of inactive users (similarly as defined above) was deleted. No doubt there are still a few remaining, but they should not be a particularly big concern to anyone.

None of these users had ever posted any messages, and even in the case of a user not having posted any messages, I did not delete the user if the username or email was in use on EBT.
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