Spam accounts

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awrui
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Spam accounts

Postby awrui » 2020-05-05, 20:31

So I just had a look at the member list, which is actually a list of spam links. It's pages and pages of accounts that have zero posts, but the weirdest links in their profile, often illegal stuff. It's not enough to delete their spam posts, but the whole account has to go. Some moderator, please delete them?

This picture is just a tiny part of it.
Image

awrui
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Re: Spam accounts

Postby awrui » 2020-06-01, 15:29

Are there any moderators in this forum at all?! All the spam accounts are still up, and I just got this message

Image

vijayjohn
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Re: Spam accounts

Postby vijayjohn » 2020-06-01, 15:57

Only the administrators and global moderators can delete accounts. Language-specific forum moderators like me can only remove spam from the specific forums we moderate (in my case, the South Asian and Hindi/Urdu forums).

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md0
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Re: Spam accounts

Postby md0 » 2022-05-30, 17:18

I think I caught one before they started posting
https://forum.unilang.org/memberlist.ph ... le&u=73138

I wonder if phpBB has a toggle switch somewhere to allow us to report profiles and not just posts. Maybe this could make it a bit easier for our mods, so they can be spotted and banned before they start firing posts left and right.
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Naava
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Re: Spam accounts

Postby Naava » 2022-05-30, 20:21

We get "new members" every day and they're all spam accounts. I've wondered every now and then if they should be banned straight away but in my (admittedly not that long) experience, only a fraction of them end up trying to post anything, so I've felt banning them would be more bothersome than disapproving the spam we get. But we could do an account purge at some point, I suppose? I don't know enough to say how big of a problem having unused (spam) accounts stored wherever they are stored is. :hmm:

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md0
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Re: Spam accounts

Postby md0 » 2022-05-30, 20:34

Oh, I admit I kind of assumed it was going to start posting soon :hmm:
"If you like your clause structure, you can keep your clause structure"
Stable: Cypriot Greek (el-cy)Standard Modern Greek (el)English (en) Current: Standard German (de)
Legacy: France French (fr)Japanese (ja)Standard Turkish (tr)Elementary Finnish (fi)Netherlands Dutch (nl)

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Johanna
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Re: Spam accounts

Postby Johanna » 2022-05-30, 21:25

Naava wrote:We get "new members" every day and they're all spam accounts. I've wondered every now and then if they should be banned straight away but in my (admittedly not that long) experience, only a fraction of them end up trying to post anything, so I've felt banning them would be more bothersome than disapproving the spam we get. But we could do an account purge at some point, I suppose? I don't know enough to say how big of a problem having unused (spam) accounts stored wherever they are stored is. :hmm:

Back when I was a forum admin, we did a purge in which any account older than 6 months with 0 posts got deleted, and I think there might have been some criteria about being logged in as well. So yes, it may be time to do something similar once again.

All those accounts were never a problem per se, but they did take up a bit of server space, and especially made searching for actual members a pain in the behind.

md0 wrote:I think I caught one before they started posting
https://forum.unilang.org/memberlist.ph ... le&u=73138

I wonder if phpBB has a toggle switch somewhere to allow us to report profiles and not just posts. Maybe this could make it a bit easier for our mods, so they can be spotted and banned before they start firing posts left and right.

No, there doesn't seem to be any way to report anything other than posts or PMs. Perhaps there will be in the next upgrade?

As for reporting spam accounts with no posts yet, you can always send a PM to the forum admins as a group with a link to the profile in question. It's easier than posting here, and the forum admins will most likely be notified about it earlier too.
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