Remove Chinese posters.

[Bob Geldoff1234]

Can someone on this forum please do something to stop the Chinese adverts that arrive here every morning.My whole page is filled with carp.I cannot understand why a forum programmer can not just filter out any posts with Chinese writing in it. It really spoils what is otherwise an excellent forum.

 

[LankyWill]

It happens everyday and sometimes early afternoon as well, im struggling to see how they cant be blocked? most of them appear with a university tag in their title.

 

[Andy78]

They've been trying to clean it up for months apparently

 

[SJD]

Several people have made suggestions about how this can be stopped, but the same garbage appears again and again. The subjects are all the same, and I guess someone has a script that creates a new account and posts the stuff every day. I'm even starting to wonder if the site owner actually likes the stuff posted for some reason?

 

[telectrix]

maybe they are secret forum sponsors.

 

[Andy-1960]

Why can’t new members be authorised by a staff member before being able to post?

 

[Andy78]

Why can’t new members be authorised by a staff member before being able to post?

Probably because the website makes its revenue from advertising and the more they let in the more potential clicks. Manually authorising each new member may make the site financially nonviable.

 

[Marvo]

Nothing to do with revenue, just staff workload. Also many people wouldn't be happy to wait a few hours whilst the voluntary staff who all have other full time jobs got around to manually authorising dozens of new members on a daily basis.

I know many people think forums are a goldmine but the reality is very few of them even financially break even. I don't know the figures involved but even a relatively high traffic forum like this one won't earn the owner anything much more than beer money.

 

[Darkwood]

I will add that these attacks are probably embedded spam bots or the forum has been listed as a viable target, the problem this and all forums have is the battle between smart bots learning to get around software code and the forums software to recognise them and stop them, like Marvo has expressed, we can take extreme action and probably stop it but this will impede on your use of the forum and push members away more so than waiting for staff to pop in and delete the spam attacks. We go through waves of this, sometimes just a few and then like recently we are getting hit hard so please bear with us.

 

[derek]

Would it not help to restrict new members, to say 10 posts in the first 24 hours for example?
I do realise it might restrict some of the DIY members who have trouble explaining all they need to in a few posts.

 

[Spoon]

Would it not help to restrict new members, to say 10 posts in the first 24 hours for example?
I do realise it might restrict some of the DIY members who have trouble explaining all they need to in a few posts.

I did mention something similar in another post about spam.
I don't know if it is possible but just restrict new members (or all members) posts to no more than 1 post every 10 mins.

 

[johnduffell]

Yes it would be simple to code but only if the deployment pipeline is already there and viable. Maybe this forum is done off the shelf software though.
Recently we had a penetration attack on the system i maintain and it took a whole day of developer work to mitigate it, so things do depend on resources.
I asked a Chinese speaker what it is and apparently they are advertising fake degree certificates for those who can't go to the university themselves.

 

[Spoon]

I asked a Chinese speaker what it is and apparently they are advertising fake degree certificates for those who can't go to the university themselves

Do they do fake certificates for DI courses...? 5 weeks is way too long for me to do a course....

 

[Dillb]

Do they do fake certificates for DI courses...? 5 weeks is way too long for me to do a course....

Especially when you have a family to feed and cant afford the time off work to do it properly.