Spam, spam and more spam

[bear]

Looks like the forum is being hit with loads of spam today, the notification from this place is lighting up my mobile.
Just temporary disabled notification as really annoying
Hopefully can put something in place to stop them.
Have a good day all

[Immerse]

Fully agree, getting flooded
Have a great week!

[IWorx-Jenna]

Hello–

Can you provide you any examples? I have not received any emails at all from the forum since August, and I don’t see any spam posts at all (though John may have cleaned them up already). I would need to have a general idea where the spam is happening to try to determine how we can mitigate it.

Note–the person who was handling all of the back end processes for the forum is no longer with the company, and didn’t really leave any notes, so I am not 100% certain at this moment how spam is handled on the back end. If you could provide some more details, that will help me with my research on how to handle that.

Thanks,
-Jenna

[iworx-brandon]

We’ve made a couple of changes that should help with the spam issue and make the forums a little less enticing to spammers in the long run.

First, we’ve increased the trust level required for users to post new topics. This does make the forum less immediately usable for new users, but the requirements to be bumped up in trust level are not too intensive. They are exactly the behavior you would expect of someone coming to the forum and familiarizing themselves with the community, so we feel it’s a worthwhile trade-off compared to potentially allowing spammers the ability to post. For folks who have urgent requests/questions, the support desk of your license provider is the best place to go.

Second, we’ve disabled the setting that automatically set everyone up to use “mailing list” mode which sends an email for every single new topic. I cannot explain why this was ever considered a good idea as a default as it seems like a spammer’s dream. New users will not be automatically opted in to mailing list mode but can enable the feature in their preferences if they desire. Existing users can disable this feature in the preferences section of their profile.

We also made a few tweaks to settings based on this specific instance to help deter future attempts at similar activity.

I know I’m not sharing a ton of specifics here, but that is to ensure I’m not providing a list of exact settings that spammers need to work around.

[bear]

Sorry for late reply, thank you for your time to make the changes to stop the spam.