I'm done!

[Dunnyman]

With the relentless spam attacks and utterly lax attempts to prevent it, why bother? Upgrade the board, put some effort into it, maybe? I'll check back in a few months to see if films are being discussed instead of a boaload of crap spam.

[mkiker2089]

There has to be a way to stop the spammers. Is the board using captcha to verify new members?

What about limiting posts per day on new accounts? The software has a tiered structure in it. I know this was all suggested before but it's clear something must be done.

[molly1216]

there's a DVD Verdict Facebook account but it's just a page like a friend.
i can't find a DVDVerdict PAGE - we could migrate there until they fix the problem .

i don't like showing up finding a facefull of spam
then having to delete it for an hour.
i don't feel like chatting after that.

[Attrage]

As both a web developer myself, and a huge fan of DVD Verdict and The Jury Room, I would simply say, bear in mind that it is incredibly hard to deal with spam attacks on websites, it's impossible to prevent, and it's a royal pain in the *ss to fix. Given that the moderators/administrators do so in their own time and are not paid for their efforts, I'd say keep the criticism to a minimum and don't abandon the site, in times of spam attack the best thing we can do is keep posting/discussing on the boards, keep the site active, and give the site administrators some credit for what is quite often a thankless task!

[mkiker2089]

The easiest way to deal with spam is to prevent it. Spammers are rather lazy. Using two word Captcha, asking a verification question (such as what planet are we on, anything requiring a specific answer), and limiting new posters to one post an hour would work. None of that is in place here so someone with BBcode experience should look into it. You could also have a trial period where for 24 hours or longer all new posters would have to use captcha PER POST. That would kill the spammers dead in their tracks.

Moderators like Molly also need the global delete function to wipe people with a single step. That takes an hour long job and converts it into about 2 minutes.

At this point it's either take steps, temporarily disable new sign ins, or give up. When we visit the forum and see new posts it feels good. When we see a page of spam it makes us all just want to hit that little x button in the top corner and go lay down in a corner.

[mavrach]

It's not the moderator's fault, they aren't in charge of the software. I know Molly spent a lot of her personal time deleting the first few waves of these spam attacks. After a few days of manually deleting 150+ posts from repeated automated spammers, I would've given up. The posts are software-generated and likely set to repeat themselves, so it's crazy for somebody to try to keep up with them on their own.

It's a problem on the software side, and I've requested a response from that angle and gotten no response. So if there's any frustration IMO it should be directed that way. We need to know why the spam got so intrusive all of a sudden, and why seemingly nothing's been done about it as suggested above. Otherwise yeah there's not much reason to use the forum anymore.

But yeah, please join us on Facebook! Dunny, Mkiker & Attrage, you're some of the few Verdict members who I'm not already Facebook friends with, so go to the Verdict Friend page and "check in" and I'll friend request you.

[Steve T Power]

A few of us have been rappin on facebook in a private group.

If anyone wants in, add me up on Facebook and I'll add you into the group!

[molly1216]

Deleted spam yesterday and again today.


Mike S says that they will add moderator approval for new accounts.....did they already HAVE That?

[mavrach]

A few of us have been rappin on facebook in a private group.

If anyone wants in, add me up on Facebook and I'll add you into the group!

Can we ask anybody there who doesn't use their real name in the Jury Room to introduce themselves there?

[Michael Stailey]

Two months ago, we began receiving complaints that the Jury Room registration process was broken and people who wanted to create accounts and join the conversation were unable to. So we turned off the offending software and people were able to register again.

Then the spam started. So we've been fighting to find a balance between letting real people register and keeping the spam bots out.

I've now turned all the safeguards back on, require admin approval on new accounts, and deleted every new bogus account that had not yet activated over the past few weeks.

The reality of the situation is this. DVD Verdict and the Jury Room are both legacy systems suffering years of wear and tear. The phpBB release the JR runs on is woefully out of date and breaks every time I try upgrading to the latest version. Verdict too has suffered significant code breakage, we don't have an IT person who can debug Mike's incremental design structure without breaking the site (even Mike himself was unable to fix the Upcoming Releases scripts, so all that information is now updated by hand), and the years in development site redesign (a brand new site built from scratch) has been a nightmare of epic proportions.

It's not that I don't hear your complaints. It's simply a matter of not having the time, energy, or financial resources to address them all. Keeping the main site running has been my primary objective, and for eight years I've been doing the best I can. That's all I've got.

[Dunnyman]

A few of us have been rappin on facebook in a private group.

If anyone wants in, add me up on Facebook and I'll add you into the group!

You listed as Steve T Power there?

[Steve T Power]

A few of us have been rappin on facebook in a private group.

If anyone wants in, add me up on Facebook and I'll add you into the group!

You listed as Steve T Power there?

Steve Power - Mount Pearl, NF

[molly1216]

more spam...bored now...

[Gabriel Girard]

Two months ago, we began receiving complaints that the Jury Room registration process was broken and people who wanted to create accounts and join the conversation were unable to. So we turned off the offending software and people were able to register again.

Then the spam started. So we've been fighting to find a balance between letting real people register and keeping the spam bots out.

I've now turned all the safeguards back on, require admin approval on new accounts, and deleted every new bogus account that had not yet activated over the past few weeks.

The reality of the situation is this. DVD Verdict and the Jury Room are both legacy systems suffering years of wear and tear. The phpBB release the JR runs on is woefully out of date and breaks every time I try upgrading to the latest version. Verdict too has suffered significant code breakage, we don't have an IT person who can debug Mike's incremental design structure without breaking the site (even Mike himself was unable to fix the Upcoming Releases scripts, so all that information is now updated by hand), and the years in development site redesign (a brand new site built from scratch) has been a nightmare of epic proportions.

It's not that I don't hear your complaints. It's simply a matter of not having the time, energy, or financial resources to address them all. Keeping the main site running has been my primary objective, and for eight years I've been doing the best I can. That's all I've got.

Thanks for the update Mr. Stailey! Much appreciated.

[mkiker2089]

With the new spam attacks maybe it's time to get serious. Disabling all new sign ups perhaps until this can be fixed.

Spammers in general are lazy. Captcha was enough to stop them until everyone had it, then they had to manually sign up, then auto post. There must be some level of control that can at least prevent them from flooding. Is it not possible to give them a one post per hour limit?

[Michael Stailey]

New registrations have been disabled. However, most of these attacks are from accounts registered over the past several months. To circumvent those sleeper spammers, there's now a 2 min delay between posts, and a queuing of posts for approval for users with less than 25 posts to their account (which means I can delete the accounts without you guys having to deal with their shit). With any luck, this should stem the tide.

My hope is still to combine the old Jury Room database with this one on a brand new phpBB forums on the new site. If anyone knows people who are geniuses when it comes to such database manipulation, let me know. The ultimate goal is to have someone on staff dedicated to managing the entire social media landscape for Verdict (forums, facebook, twitter, tumblr, and pinterest).

[molly1216]

New registrations have been disabled. However, most of these attacks are from accounts registered over the past several months. To circumvent those sleeper spammers, there's now a 2 min delay between posts, and a queuing of posts for approval for users with less than 25 posts to their account (which means I can delete the accounts without you guys having to deal with their shit). With any luck, this should stem the tide.

My hope is still to combine the old Jury Room database with this one on a brand new phpBB forums on the new site. If anyone knows people who are geniuses when it comes to such database manipulation, let me know. The ultimate goal is to have someone on staff dedicated to managing the entire social media landscape for Verdict (forums, facebook, twitter, tumblr, and pinterest).

thanks
this is the first time i have logged in and not had to clean

i wonder if they ever make any money with the spam posts?

[Attrage]

i wonder if they ever make any money with the spam posts?

Surprisingly enough, the answer is yes.

[molly1216]

i wonder if they ever make any money with the spam posts?

Surprisingly enough, the answer is yes.

okay that has to me 'splained to me'
nearly all the posts we deleted are gibberish link farms.

[mavrach]

i wonder if they ever make any money with the spam posts?

Surprisingly enough, the answer is yes.

okay that has to me 'splained to me'
nearly all the posts we deleted are gibberish link farms.

Yeah I'm very curious myself. Why are the bulk of these in terrible English that barely gets the (unrelated) point across? And how does a pages-long discription of an Asian basketball match, with a random unrelated link in the signature, posted on a DVD forum, earn any money? I assume this is all illegal identity theft-type stuff that would just infect your PC with a virus anyway right?

And do people really beleive these are real posts, or do they rely on accidental clicking of the links? Are they relying on elderly non-computer folk reading these boards and going "Ooooh, Watches!!!" ?

[molly1216]

i wonder if they ever make any money with the spam posts?

Surprisingly enough, the answer is yes.

okay that has to me 'splained to me'
nearly all the posts we deleted are gibberish link farms.

Yeah I'm very curious myself. Why are the bulk of these in terrible English that barely gets the (unrelated) point across? And how does a pages-long discription of an Asian basketball match, with a random unrelated link in the signature, posted on a DVD forum, earn any money? I assume this is all illegal identity theft-type stuff that would just infect your PC with a virus anyway right?

And do people really beleive these are real posts, or do they rely on accidental clicking of the links? Are they relying on elderly non-computer folk reading these boards and going "Ooooh, Watches!!!" ?

i have been thinking

it must be something that doesn't have anything to do with humans
perhaps they are counting on some of them NOT being deleted..
once these links and word strings get infested in a website they would accumulate in the SEO indexes

so eventually when someone goes to google to look for faux gucci watches their actual link will come up high on the search
because the number of instances of the link on the internet has been artificially increased.

best i can think of.

the more i read about the internet
the more i realize SEOs are everything.

[Attrage]

i wonder if they ever make any money with the spam posts?

Surprisingly enough, the answer is yes.

okay that has to me 'splained to me'
nearly all the posts we deleted are gibberish link farms.

Hi Molly much as I'd like to come off as a lot smarter than I actually am, there's heaps of websites out there that explain it far better than I ever could (my brain is mostly reserved for useless movie trivia )

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/how-email-spammers-really-make-their-money/6671

[molly1216]

i wonder if they ever make any money with the spam posts?

Surprisingly enough, the answer is yes.

okay that has to me 'splained to me'
nearly all the posts we deleted are gibberish link farms.

Hi Molly much as I'd like to come off as a lot smarter than I actually am, there's heaps of websites out there that explain it far better than I ever could (my brain is mostly reserved for useless movie trivia )

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/how-email-spammers-really-make-their-money/6671

thanks
that will help.

[Polynikes]

As both a web developer myself, and a huge fan of DVD Verdict and The Jury Room, I would simply say, bear in mind that it is incredibly hard to deal with spam attacks on websites, it's impossible to prevent, and it's a royal pain in the *ss to fix. Given that the moderators/administrators do so in their own time and are not paid for their efforts, I'd say keep the criticism to a minimum and don't abandon the site, in times of spam attack the best thing we can do is keep posting/discussing on the boards, keep the site active, and give the site administrators some credit for what is quite often a thankless task!

Seconded.