Why are we getting so many spammers?

This is a constant problem.

Basically it’s the nature of the beast!!! Most mornings when I first come on, I check for SPAM & report it to the Mods in order to help relieve their need to search for it themselves. Their plate is full enough without having to ferret it out themselves!!! Also, I’ve noticed that SPAM seems to come in waves. We’ll have none for a while & then POOF…there’s a new group who find us!!! I often wonder IF whoever is training them is recommending our site or IF it’s coincidence.

I think having a set of mods, who only have to deal with spam would help.
I’d do it if such an arrangement was made.

@Brian1946 maybe contact them and see if you can do that. :)

Several years ago, one of the Mods stated that flagging helped them to see where the SPAM was located so they could zap it. So, I consider reporting it to them as my way of dealing with SPAM. At that point, it is up to the Mods to zap or not!!!

I had a spam call at work this morning! Spammers are spamming everywhere.

It’s definitely the nature of the beat with the site set up (necessarily set up) where people can post without being vetted. Maybe if new members were made to be vetted before their posts went live, that might help but I realize that there is no new site development at present.

I flag spam when I see it which is usually in the early morning hours or middle of the night. Another thing that would be helpful (and again I realize there is no new development so there will be no changes), is if a post were flagged, there was something visible to all so multiple people don’t flag the same post, not realizing it’s already been flagged.

[mod says] Yeah, it’s not more than usual. It’s just that we’re better or worse at removing it quickly, depending on our schedules, time spent away from the internet, and overlap between the mod team.

Though there’s no new development to the site, we’ve actually made some changes as to which channels the system can use to notify us. Traditionally, it’s email. That’s been a problem for a while because the amount of email spam makes it extremely difficult to sift through to find flags, feedback, etc. We get 20–50 messages with spammy content or gibberish per day – here’s a quote from the latest: “PDFhBkxuqKsWVb”.

I’m hoping that Ben can migrate most alerts to Discord, which would improve visibility. Jellies can help by flagging, and by never reposting spammers’ names or messages – if you do, we have to remove those posts too, and the extra clicks add up to slow us down.

@longgone, what is Discord? It sounds like some sort of purgatory that most of us have never heard of.

@longgone Thank you I know you guys are doing your BEST and I am grateful :)
but “discord” is something I have no idea what that is. Can we help by doing something different?

Discord is a social networking site originally created for gamers. Particularly, it is good for letting people talk to each other while playing games. Now it is used by many people for other types of discussions. It’s organized into “servers” (which anyone can create on any topic, for your own friends, to discuss a game, or project, or whatever). It allows text, audio, video, screen-sharing, etc.

It runs on both computers and mobile devices (and/or web browsers), and so you can let people use it to send you alerts to get your attention, so it could be a way for Fluther to alert mods when there’s a Flag, if Ben programmed Fluther to do that.

^ Perfectly explained!

@Zaku Thank you very much for explaining that so I can understand :)

Everyone has already said what I want to say. I just want to add that spammers tend to be more active at certain time in the day. It just seems to you that there are more spams than usual because you just happens to log in at the right or wrong time.

The only way to stop spams for good is to IP ban, but that would cause problems to a lot of users here and deter new people from coming. That’s why we don’t do that.