Forums » Feature Wishing Well » Read Thread

Edit: Title so this post better reflects what I'm thinking

 

Due to what's currently happening (RainbowDash spamming the fuck out of the forums), I think mods should be able to temporarily lock down forums so nobody can post in them to provide some time to ban the spammer and delete their shitposts.

Another way to stop this is to be able to IP ban, although that might be very hard to implement.

Captchas may be required if the user is posting more than say 4 posts a minute. Furthermore, captchas during signup (and preferably email verification as well) would do a world of good.

I'd say limit it to two posts a minute, because you're obviously spamming if you're posting four times a minute.

Captchas may slow things down (as in once they're triggered you have to captcha for every post for the next say 12 hours). The more permanent solution is a ban, instead of captchas, but right now we're on the metaphorical dark side of the mod presence moon, no one's coming right now.

I really hope we do not need to implement captchas. I despise them. I really absolutely hate them with a passion. It doesn't matter if they are the "select the pictures that have numbers" or the "type the letters in this box," I almost always get them "wrong" at least once. I know they have a purpose, but in my view they create more problems than they solve.

Captcha is awful, yes. It's another of those situations of the 'solution' being as much an annoyance for the legitimate users as the trolls, yeah.

Email confirmation is the main thing I've wanted to see, that and obviously, one account per email. Making a bunch of new accounts then becomes tedious enough to be a deterrent to this kind of thing.

Suggestion for IP bans have been hand waved away by past admins as too easy to get around, but I think that's really overestimating the intelligence of the typical trolls we get. And I mean, there's a reason that and email confirmations are the standard at pretty much every forum out there. Nothing's crazier or more obsessive than a socially broken nerd, but 99% of the time those precautions are enough.

But CYS has been around for ages and so it's not like the site's facing anything it hasn't before, people were panicking just a little too much IMO.

We've got 3J able to do updates now but either one of those things I suspect would need a significant amount of work, and he has a life and a job and has already spent a ridiculous amount of time improving the site on other ways the past months.

Though of course Endmaster has a job and family and his own RL stuff to deal with too and can't be expected to be able to just drop everything and deal with things 24/7 every time this sort of thing happens. It's basically a matter of whether it's more practical to fix things now or later given limited time and manpower.

Actually, the 2014 reCAPTCHA only requires clicking a button to solve it:

https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/

There's also plans to include an invisible reCAPTCHA:

https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/comingsoon/invisible.html

If I remember correctly, deleting a thread is literally almost as simple as pressing a button. I think the main issue at this point is that there are no mods online to actually delete the threads/ban whoever's spamming. A lockdown wouldn't work either in this case, and would probably be quite a bit of work to implement.

Yes, but imagine if there are 100 spammy and deformed threads that should be deleted. That equates to 100 clicks to delete each thread! A lockdown would work so that person will give up, and not make it much more of a hassle.

How would a lockdown work to demotivate a spammer, without inconveniencing the other users to such a degree that they'll also leave? 

Besides, I think the whole 'having to make a new account because the other one got banned' thing we've got now is just as much a hassle for trolls, and doesn't impact the rest of the userbase. But that again means a mod has to be online to wield the banhammer, just like with a site lockdown.

In the end, there unfortunately is no magic 'make trolls gk away' button. But we've managed to survive Ryder and TSR, and we'll probably survive this one as well.

Glad to see I haven't had any effect on the guy AT ALL. Lol.

Well, you inspired them to use their Imagination. For terrible terrible things. It's disappointing really, this really was a case study in going full retard. (Never go full retard).

"I'm Rainbow Dash. Don't worry I'm a super nice person and it's hard for me to actually get upset about anything. I like horror, adventure, and fantasy. My story-games will revolve around such things. Don't be afraid to ask for help If you need it because I'm very good at writing, story-making and other stuff.😊."

What did she mean by this?

One (relatively simpler) option would be to put a temporary lockdown on creating new accounts for a time period (say an hour), and delete the live accounts, should this thing happen again.

I'm actually pretty glad this happened, there's a few basic security measures we've been wanting the forum to be updated with for awhile now and now we might actually get them.

Just sucks for 3J since I know he was trying to take some time off, but while this spammer is just a mild annoyance, it may prevent someone who actually knows what they're doing from doing more meaningful damage in the future.