Invasion

[Mark J]

4 hours ago, drzaius said:

I see this as an attack, not an attempt to actually drive traffic to Temu. These spam messages are so bad that I can't see anyone, no matter how clueless, responding to them

Yes, I consider it a denial of service attack, but I can't think why this forum would be a target.   

[Beechwood Chip]

On 2/13/2025 at 5:24 PM, Mark J said:

Yes, I consider it a denial of service attack, but I can't think why this forum would be a target.   

In my day job, I've seen a few things that were effectively denial of service attacks, but were intended to accomplish something else and just went out of control.  I think this is that.  Add, “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity”.  My guess is that someone wrote a tool for spamming forums, and some other more stupid person figured out how to configure it for this forum and set it up to send a zillion really stupid messages.

That's my guess, but who knows?

[Beechwood Chip]

On 2/13/2025 at 2:24 PM, Von said:

I went back to see what the sign-in process is. I'm surprised they are able to both script both the Google reCAPTCHA and the workworking question.

Googling for posting limits for the Invision Community platform isn't turning up anything obvious helpful.

Annoying situation. Thank you to the mods for your hard work.

It's scary that they can get past the reCAPTCHA.  Word is that bots can get past reCAPTCHA v2, and we should upgrade to v3.

Is the woodworking question the same every time?  If so, can we change it easily?  I like the idea of responding to an invasion by blocking new accounts for a day, and also changing the woodworking question.

[krtwood]

And they are back

[wtnhighlander]

9 hours ago, Beechwood Chip said:

Does it matter if we flag as "spammer", or if we save a few clicks by taking the default, "not spam, but I want to tell the moderator"?

When a moderater flags them as spammer, the account gets banned.

[Von]

On 2/13/2025 at 7:31 PM, Beechwood Chip said:

Is the woodworking question the same every time?

No, I've saw at least two different questions in my quick checking.

[fcschoenthal]

On 2/13/2025 at 8:03 PM, wtnhighlander said:

When a moderator flags them as spammer, the account gets banned.

Unfortunately, that only means that they have to create a new account before they can start over again. I saw at least a dozen accounts and doubt that they were different people.

[wtnhighlander]

I banned another dozen or so Temu Ad accounts this morning. Looks like they follow a pattern of creating a new account every hour, and posting 5 times within a few minutes. Rinse and repeat...

[pkinneb]

On 2/14/2025 at 5:50 AM, wtnhighlander said:

I banned another dozen or so Temu Ad accounts this morning. Looks like they follow a pattern of creating a new account every hour, and posting 5 times within a few minutes. Rinse and repeat...

Thanks!!

[Von]

Thank you.

Doing a little searching for useful hints. I apologize if the mods are already aware of these.

This post from Invision suggests "while you're using a CAPTCHA and Q&A challenges, we find hCAPTCHA to be more effective in blocking spam and you only have 1 Q&A challenge questions which is easy for a bot to resolve. I would suggest making multiple Q&A challenge questions which are related to your niche but not easily Google-able but your audience will easily solve yet take bots a long time or never." (About hCAPTCHA)

If the spammers are using disposable email addresses, looks like there is now Disposable Email Filtering (2nd thing discussed in the post).

[Von]

And they are back.

I tried adding the spammers to my ignored users list. It was tedious but adding 4 users cleans up the site for me.

[Beechwood Chip]

I just banned a half dozen accounts.  One was pharma spam, not Temu.  The seem to be one per hour, I was asleep for about 7 hours, so that makes sense.  The regular spacing suggests that it's all one automatic process.

[Mark J]

Maybe I didn't notice this before, but the post I just reported was enormously long.  

Is there a simpler way to ignore the user?  It would be nice if there was a button on the user profile.

[wtnhighlander]

The problem with filtering the user is that the spam bot creates a new user account, about every 5 posts.

Please keep reporting,so the mods can 'ban' the accounts. Banning kills that account and deletes all its posts.

[drzaius]

Remember a few years ago, how the Knots forum on the FWW site got so clogged with spam that it was entirely unusable? That's what happens when you don't have mods that are on the ball with cleaning things up.

The efforts of the mods here are certainly appreciated.

[Von]

On 2/15/2025 at 10:53 AM, wtnhighlander said:

The problem with filtering the user is that the spam bot creates a new user account, about every 5 posts.

Please keep reporting,so the mods can 'ban' the accounts. Banning kills that account and deletes all its posts.

I completely agree and will do. There was so much spam this morning that I was having a hard time finding legitimate posts and ignoring a handful of users let me use the site.

Is reporting one post per spamming user enough?

[Beechwood Chip]

On 2/15/2025 at 12:18 PM, Von said:

Is reporting one post per spamming user enough?

Yes, because we ban users, not posts.

 

Thanks!

[Von]

Thank you again Mods.

[Chestnut]

Thanks for the hard work mods. I wish i could help more than just reporting but that's better than nothing i hope.

They are back.

[fcschoenthal]

Persistent little devils. Still wonder what their object might be.

[legenddc]

Is it possible to ban the word Temu in posts?

In the meantime, I'll keep flagging them. Thank you to everyone flagging and removing the accounts.

[difalkner]

On 2/17/2025 at 7:57 AM, fcschoenthal said:

Still wonder what their object might be.

They get paid for posting info and links regardless of how long it stays up and viable.  The more they post the more they make. A bot can create the account and create a post very quickly and with little effort.

On other sites where I'm an admin about 90% automatically go into moderation for review where we ban and spam clean them before ever reaching public view so it's curious why these spammers keep trying since most of their posts fail to reach an audience.

[Coop]

“The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming”

[Chestnut]

I'm just baffled people use that site in general. It screams sketchy scam. It's made worse by the fact that the whole backbone of the company is to exploit a duty free loop hole.

[Von]

On 2/12/2025 at 4:52 PM, Mark J said:

 It takes 7 clicks to report a spa m post. 

I've done a little web searching and don't find any ways to make this easier. Apparently the software developers do not have a world of frequent spam in mind.

BTW, I think I'm also seeing some more sneaky spammers whose posts seem on topic but include links to advertising. Presumably part of an SEO campaign. I believe the mods are also cleaning these up and I'll add another thank you.