Stopping the influx of spammers

[Kink3bird]

Hey I don't know if it's been bothering anyone else but recently I've noticed a increasingly noticeable amount of spammers, robots, or whatever they are. They are easy to identify. A typical post would be:


I like it.
You are right.
I have never tried it but I hear it's good.

You know, basic sentence responses that really just take up space and ruin threads.
Especially since they 1, don't contribute to anything and 2, looks horrible when a nice thread with three pages or so has a bunch of banned crossed out names in it.
I'm also maybe noticing they are starting threads now and I've posted in a few threads now only to return to it and see the author of it has been banned.

Is anything being done about this and is it becoming a bigger problem or am I just noticing it more?
Is there anything we can do to combat this?
More forum restrictions I know would be tough. I hate forums where your on a probation period for trying to join or don't have access to features because you don't have ten posts because it hurts those who are here for legit reasons and at the same time promotes the spammers to make even more useless posts just so they get full access faster. It's a double edged sword I know but there has to be something to curb this problem.

If it's not a big deal for anyone else though then I'm sorry, maybe I'm just venting frustration.
Thanks for reading my woes and quarrels.

[LiNuX]

If you spot them then just report them. I agree that those posts are annoying but only so much that we can do to spot and remove.

Spammers are more much rampant during the holidays anyway because they're all home or are trying to sell stuff for the occasions. It should calm down soon. Like in September to October, we probably had a record low spam count, I think I only banned 3 people in the two months, whereas I banned 3 people today for spamming.

[paecmaker]

Cant you have a bot that looks after spammers, maybe it will search for several things like how posts looks like, how many posts it got(if it got over 20 posts its probably not a spammer) and so on?

[LiNuX]

If only computers were that smart.

[paecmaker]

If only computers were that smart.

Cant they be programmed to look for certain key words(amongst other things)?

[Muffincat]

I highly doubt Linux is going to spend time trying to program a bot that will look through a forum looking for spammers :P That would take a bit of time, and that's what the mods are for. If we found a bot that did that... the forum program probably won't work with it and it would have to go through every post and just... that seems extremely ineffective, annoying, and not really necessary. It would be really nice, though :P

It doesn't hurt anyone to see posts that aren't substantial, so it's just kind of one of those things. They'll get seen and properly handled eventually. Dili and I are indisposed at the moment so we can't help find them, and I used to do quite a bit of clean up so it's probably just differing times we're on, and everything.

The holidays make the other mods a little busier, too, I'd imagine ;P

I know it's annoying to have spam posts, but like I said, I don't think it's the worst thing in the world. Also, we have had members who have joined and made posts that looked like spam, but they ended up staying in the community and contributing more. It wouldn't be fair to them to ban them outright just for that.

[LiNuX]

Maybe, but that's assuming that there is a bot for this :) it's something that needs to be created first

edit: ^ I wrote that at 9am before heading out but forgot to press enter, and muffin posted in the meantime.

But she covered a lot, that's what mods are for, and we can't expect bots to make decisions a human can, the day bots can do that is the day Judgement Day Starts and we should go looking for John Conner if we want to live.