@cervantezbilllie is posting some pretty odd stuff…
Mods please delete user nigehkang
- Thread starter P2B
- Start date
@jamepalmer same trying to shift contact to e-mail
P2B
Top Post Dawg
@Ileucatfa today
2004LB7
Veteran Member
And also @klesadani
borninabus
Veteran Member
i wonder if anything can be done about all these brand-new user spams?
P2B
Top Post Dawg
Yes - discussed earlier in the thread.
borninabus
Veteran Member
then i guess i should have asked: i wonder if anything will be done about all these brand-new user spams?
P2B
Top Post Dawg
The mods have been deleting the posts and locking the accounts, usually within a few hours.
P2B
Top Post Dawg
@Fjunksylna today
hskrdu
Top Post Dawg
I've been using ignore, but it's not clear why the forum hasn't yet adopted a post-limit for new members (as suggested earlier). I've been to a few other forums on the same software and they have it. Right now Fred's seems to just be an easy target.
P2B
Top Post Dawg
Which is why we are being hit on a daily basis.
JDSwan87
Black Swamp Thing
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2014
- Location
- Michigan near Toledo
- TDI
- 2001 Jetta TDI, 5 speed Lagoon Blue Metallic(sold); 2005 Jetta TDI Wagon auto
User Ftowtuachoo today. I flagged 3 of their posts
Bob S.
Top Post Dawg
Fdambonorb today
Nuje
Top Post Dawg
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2005
- Location
- Island near Vancouver
- TDI
- 2002 Golf 6MT; 2015 Sportwagen 6MT; 2018 A3 e-tron 6DSG
Has anyone gotten "Oops - the server can't seem to find what you're looking for" (or wording to that effect) messages occasionally in the past day or so?
I'm guessing these two things are related (like maybe the server is fighting off a bombardment from the spambots and temporarily halts serving up pages...?)
I'm guessing these two things are related (like maybe the server is fighting off a bombardment from the spambots and temporarily halts serving up pages...?)
P2B
Top Post Dawg
It's a page generation error, which I understand is caused by database corruption. The server traps the error and is able to reconcile the database, which is why the error typically fixes itself within a few minutes.
I have no idea why it seems to be occurring more frequently of late, but I doubt it's connected to the cyrillic spammers, who don't really generate much traffic in the grand scheme of things.
2004LB7
Veteran Member
Every few days now it seems
P2B
Top Post Dawg
Multiple times per day now it seems
P2B
Top Post Dawg
0 posts. Why is he a problem?
2004LB7
Veteran Member
PradoTDI
Veteran Member
d24tdi
Veteran Member
In the Volvo forum I operate, after fighting this kind of issue for years and seeing it get way worse in recent months as the bots have gotten smarter, I have found the only way to avoid endless bot registrations and spamming is to manually approve every new registration. We have a series of required questions that each new member needs to answer when signing up, and then a moderator reviews those answers. Very specific things that require a human answer, not things that AI can find by searching. For example, asking what years an ALH engine was produced is something that AI will be able to get an answer to. Asking a string of questions like what car are you working on, location, how many miles on the car, why they're joining, etc gives you a lot more info to judge for approval. Most of the time, when you require the new member to enter all this, it becomes quite easy to tell subjectively when you are looking at a human response vs a computer bot's entries. Things like grammar, colloquialisms, etc give solid clues.
This is the only somewhat dependable solution I know of at this point. Even with this approach, about 1 in 50 registrations is close enough to be a difficult call, and in those cases, I send the new member an email asking them to write back with more detail or give me a phone call to judge their human-ness better. But that knocks it way down from what it would otherwise be. Things like security questions, CAPTCHA systems, email verification, etc are all way too easy for modern spam systems to outsmart.
Pretty soon maybe even extensive written answers that are manually reviewed and approved by human eyes won't be a dependable way to stop AI-powered spam. But for now it's mostly a success story for us on our other board. The big downside is that it's somewhat labor intensive, and it slows down the process for new members registering as they wait for approval. But the good news is that tdiclub has enough active members that it would probably be feasible to assemble a fairly large team of moderators that could share this task here.
Just an idea. This forum seems to be suffering worse than most that I use from spam and scam efforts.
This is the only somewhat dependable solution I know of at this point. Even with this approach, about 1 in 50 registrations is close enough to be a difficult call, and in those cases, I send the new member an email asking them to write back with more detail or give me a phone call to judge their human-ness better. But that knocks it way down from what it would otherwise be. Things like security questions, CAPTCHA systems, email verification, etc are all way too easy for modern spam systems to outsmart.
Pretty soon maybe even extensive written answers that are manually reviewed and approved by human eyes won't be a dependable way to stop AI-powered spam. But for now it's mostly a success story for us on our other board. The big downside is that it's somewhat labor intensive, and it slows down the process for new members registering as they wait for approval. But the good news is that tdiclub has enough active members that it would probably be feasible to assemble a fairly large team of moderators that could share this task here.
Just an idea. This forum seems to be suffering worse than most that I use from spam and scam efforts.
2004LB7
Veteran Member
This is somewhat the process we use on another forum I help moderate.
The mods have access to see the list of new users waiting for approval. We can look at the IP address and any other users that are using the same IP. This is often a tail tail sign as most spammers and bots are all coming from one or a few locations. So, they tend to have some IP overlap. We can spot this and scrutinize them further
But the biggest improvement we got was a questionnaire at the registration process. Right now the question is pretty simple with "what transmission is used on the Duramax" and several answers are acceptable with Allison, ZF6 and 4L80 all working. So far the AI bots haven't seemed to figure it out despite how simple it should be. Maybe they don't know it's a question that needs to be answered correctly for it to work. I know this won't last once the spammers figure out how to defeat it. But since November/December of last year when it was put into place no "new" bots or spammers made it through. There have been a handful we had to mop up that got through before the change. It looks like they would make a bunch of accounts and sit on them for later. Like sleeper cells. We can tell based on the registration date that they are all before the change. But nothing new after.
Another Mod privilege is being able to see everyone online and quarry their IP and other information to see if they are spammers or bots. I like to check this several times a day to see if there are any that stand out. Sometimes user names are a hint. Bots and AI don't seem to understand how to make ones that humans normally use
We know that eventually we'll have to make the questions more complex and pay much closer attention to the new registrations. But for now, it works
d24tdi
Veteran Member
Yeah, we also have been doing something like that for a couple years on the Volvo page. I have found that those kinds of questions help but the bots eventually get it figured out and you have to change the question pretty often for it to be very effective. We have done things like "what is the cubic centimeter displacement of the diesel Volvo engine" and "who built diesel engines for Volvos" (with multiple possible correct answers there -- VW, Volkswagen, Volkswagon, Audi) and they knock the bot registrations down to zero for a few months. But then at some point one bot figures it out and suddenly there will be a flood of hundreds of new bot registrations. Luckily we can still see and stop those with the manual approval process and the answers to the questionnaire (what do you drive, where are you located etc).
The other tricky issue with really complex questions that make the bots struggle for a temporary time at least, is that they can stop some humans too. Especially those who aren't mechanically savvy or not already well versed in the history of the equipment they are joining to ask about. For example there are probably Duramax owners out there who are not gearheads, use their pickup to pull a horse trailer or something, and have no idea what transmissions were used under those trucks, yet they might have a good reason to want to join and get some help with something. They might not even know where to start to look to find the answer to the question. And then there are the folks who are going to get kicked out because of some kind of typo or grammar/spelling mistake or something, and you lose them too. That's something I worry about with the questions we ask on our forum. I think it's still a good tradeoff to use this method but it's always a concern of stopping some valid new memberships while trying to keep out the crap. Especially in an age where forum participation is declining as membership is lost to much less functional social platforms, and you really want every new member you can get to join and participate.
Yeah we have seen that too. They'll pop out of the woodwork months after they first registered with a bunch of spam links. It must be a strategy they use to avoid getting caught early on. Sleeper cells is a good way to put it
Yep the usernames can give a clue, especially if it's an obvious mismatch with the email address they registered with ... if the username is "JimmyT" and the email address is a completely different name then I have found that to be a telltale in many cases. Especially if they answered the questionnaire responses in a weird way as well. Still though, every now and then there are borderline cases, and humans do strange things too. Again a risk of filtering out a real registration.
Yeah, the sad truth is it'll only keep getting more difficult for anyone managing a community like this. The bots will increase in number and intelligence, while the humans decrease in number (and intelligence?) and keep shifting over to Facebook and Instagram and TikTok or whatever is next. "Progress" I guess.
It certainly is getting noticeably worse on this board even just in the last year or so..... Way more bots, more outages. @VW Derf - anything the rest of us can do to help with all this just let us know, it's a tough challenge.