#631 Spam on forum

[Michalis Kamburelis]

The forum of our project castle-engine ( https://sourceforge.net/p/castle-engine/discussion/general/ ) is getting a lot of spam lately (more than 10 spam posts per day, roughly counting; today it was 17). The spam is send as anonymous, so it is held for moderation, but it's still a little troublesome for us moderators -- our moderation queue is often filled with spam.

I know you guys have improved the spam classification lately (after our ticket https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/feature-requests/623/ ), but it seems that new spam gets through the filters.

The spam submissions seem quite similar. In the last days, there is a lot of spam about weight loss, and they all seem to lead to one particular website, with various diet-related keywords around. Feel free to investigate our moderation queue to see the examples ( https://sourceforge.net/p/castle-engine/discussion/general/moderate ), or I could just attach them to this ticket if you prefer.

Can you please:

1. Improve the spam classification filters, so that they capture the new spam.

2. And/or allow the forum moderators to manage a blacklist of words (or links) that automatically classify as spam (so the post goes straight to "spam" queue).

3. Or add some captcha before allowing anonymous posts.

The solution 2. would allow us to fight with spam more automatically by ourselves. E.g. blacklisting the current spammer website link would eliminate most of the recent spam. The spammer seems to send this automatically, not checking whether it actually reaches any public (since it never reaches the public anyway, it's only a nuisance to moderators).

Thank you!

[EugeneLoza]

Yep, confirming and supporting the issue. The spam we were getting lately is 100% covered by 3 categories: drugs, weight loss and online casino and could have been automatically filtered by a few corresponding keywords.