Spam warning for everyone!

Kymeia

Whatever was done evidently wasn't enough

Milos

How unfortunate...

Matt_NI

Hey everyone,

Again not sure what happened but as an emergency measure we changed a couple of things until we figure things out.

1. Newcomers are forced-check, meaning they go to moderation queue automatically.
2. We reduce the threshold for spam reactions so it only requires one person to send a post to the moderation queue.
3. We edited our flood control setting so you cannot create more than 1 discussions every 5 minutes (if you do, you trigger spam detection and land in our spam queue)

We're still in touch with our dev team to try and figure things out. I'll report when I have more info today.

Kymeia

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/131211#Comment_131211

All good - I would also suggest anyone who gets more than 1 spam flag gets posting rights suspended pending investigation just incase we get 'sleeper' spammers who post innocuous messages till they are settled in then blitz the forum

reffahcs

Oh now they're just straight being annoying trolls.

Jojo123

Is there a way to flag this nonsense WITHOUT opening the thread?

reffahcs

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/131400#Comment_131400

Yes, click on the Flag icon below the spam messages

Jojo123

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/131404#Comment_131404

Cant see any flag, only only see that inside a thread. Tried disabling a raft of stuff in browser and still cant see it .

Percivale

Here we go again

1. NI forums is a low lying fruit and hence easy to succumb to this attack.

2. Not the first time it's been flooded with spam.

3. I have suggested to use a more established and tested platform such as the one used at Elektronauts.com

4. People in charge feels somehow that this should still be the way forward.

5. There are no resources and know how to prevent a reoccurrence.

6. It is what it is.

reffahcs

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/131406#Comment_131406

My apologies, I read your original post incorrectly as "without opening this thread"

No there's no way to flag a post that I know of without clicking on each one, scrolling and flagging it.

Kymeia

How are they getting past the measures in place already? How are they still able to post in Korean? How are they able to add images and urls?

Most of all they appear to be joining still at this moment - like this one joined a minute ago https://community.native-instruments.com/profile/452091/carbajaltisdal and is already spamming - What happened to the moderation queue and limits on starting new discussions?

The tactics seem to have switched to bulk signups under multiple accounts, each one posting a spam message rather than one poster posting multiple messages - but new accounts should not be able to do any of the above, post images, urls, get past the moderation queue

Kymeia

At least the spam flagging works better and shifts they straight into moderation, but that should not be necessary for new posters, that's where they should all go - but these parasites should not be able to sign up in the first place?

Matt_NI

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/131423#Comment_131423

I'm not sure how this is happening honestly. All these measures are applicable now and it seems to be getting through regardless. I'm going to spend more time on it today to see what makes this bot still be able to post.

Matt_NI

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/131426#Comment_131426

Exactly, at the end of the day its our sign-up mechanism that's a fault here. Our web team is working on that though already and has a tool they will put in front of the signup to prevent bots.

Matt_NI

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/131413#Comment_131413

If you think Discourse (host using for Elektronauts) is more able to prevent these types of thing you are wrong. This would happen with any platform and already happened with our old forum to some degree. You can go to the Discourse forum and see for yourself, it's full of customers complaining about the same thing. On top of that, Discourse is using the exact same anti-spam tools than our providers. These are the sames almost every platform is using ...