We're being invaded!

[wahming]

Invasion!

Spam.jpg (188.92 KiB) Viewed 4516 times

Anybody find it ironic that the Factorio forums are being invaded by people looking to hawk the products of their own factories?

[FORTHELOLZ]

get the tank

[wahming]

get the tank

From random spammy Chinese online sellers? What, it falls apart after you hit a speedbump?

[Mia Rose]

The bots are invading. D:

[OdinYggd]

I reported a couple such threads earlier and they were cleaned up fairly quickly. Hopefully the moderators aren't all asleep at once.

Seems like better anti-spambot measures are needed.



You know, that could be a fun mod. Adding 'spambots' to the game, that just fly around pretending to be helpful while really getting in the way. Make it so that normal bots become spambots at random, giving them a sort of half-life.

With 0.13's changes to the roboport it should be possible to capture and filter out these rogues, but then what do you do with them besides using them for target practice?

[Koub]

OK everything is cleaned. There is indeed a part of the night where most if not all the mods are sleeping, sorry for the inconvenience.
Advised behaviour is to report one spam (at least one from each spamming acount you stumble upon), and ignore it : it will be deleted quickly.

[sillyfly]

There is indeed a part of the night where most if not all the mods are sleeping, sorry for the inconvenience.

Perhaps you should be looking at finding mods in other parts of the world, then... From what I can tell most mods are European, so maybe some Americans or East Asians are called for? (By geographic location, of course)

[Hamster]

Not sure if the forum can be "modded" with a feature, if 3 people report a user for spamming, the system disable that account.

[wahming]

Not sure if the forum can be "modded" with a feature, if 3 people report a user for spamming, the system disable that account.

Possible, but with so many edge cases to consider, not worth the effort.

[OdinYggd]

The solution I usually use with good results on the forums I host is that the first 3-5 posts a new user makes must be approved by a moderator before appearing on the forum.

Though it does add a little overhead in getting new users established, it almost totally shuts down such spam operations because their posts won't be visible to anyone except the forum staff.

After a little while they'll give up and go elsewhere if their crap isn't visible to anyone.

[silverkitty23]

After a little while they'll give up and go elsewhere if their crap isn't visible to anyone.

The problem being that user SpamWolf posts 50 pieces of spam and somewhere in there, user NiceLilSheep posted their first question about how to make trains go. The mods need a good eye to not accidentally crush the lil sheep while putting the tongs to the wolf. Mess that up a couple times and you're turning off users. And SpamWolf doesn't stop because SpamWolf doesn't *know* their messages aren't being seen, because SpamWolf isn't a person who is checking the forums to see if their posts went up. SpamWolf is a bot

[TruePikachu]

What about a requirement to link the Factorio account to the forum account before anything that looks like a URL can be posted?

[wahming]

What about a requirement to link the Factorio account to the forum account before anything that looks like a URL can be posted?

As a general rule, I'd much rather Kovarex and the other devs kept their attention focused on getting 0.13 out the door

[Kalanndok]

Well...what about configuring the forum to automatically hide (not delete) posts and revoke "create post"-permission for new users whose posts got reported multiple times.
Afterwards a Mod needs to manually approve that account.

That might be the best of both worlds if mods in other timezones are not possible.