Stopping Chinese spam discussions

ctupramod

Recently, In our forum, we got around 15 or more Chinese spam discussions a day.
And it's annyoing to moderate each post and, delete and ban the user.
Yes I'm using the first post approval.

But is there a way to stop posting them?

For example, the post will not publish if the post contains specific chinese character.
If it's possible, we can stop this chinese spamming thing.

And i saw it's not only for me. Several people posted about this issue.

fakruzaruret

I dont give permission to users who register new to create entry. I attach users who I confident to verified, trusted etc. user groups (has create discussion permission) as manual. This is hard if your forum is big because of you need to follow new users and their bio etc.

JohnP

ctupramod

JohnP

Yep, we are having the same issue as well.

Not sure of the best solution, but what you suggest would be a pretty good one if that is possible.

luceos

Please try this as soon as you can: https://github.com/luceos/flarum-simple-spam-tools, it can hold posts for approval that aren't identified as languages installed on your community.

CyberGene

luceos is there any description (couldn't find a Discuss page, is there one?) about what exactly your tools do? What kind of filtering is applied? And when detected, what is the action taken by the extension?

fakruzaruret

luceos is it installable for flarum or only for bloomstra?

ctupramod

luceos I saw it's currently not an complete extension with UI.
Guess I have to wait.
Cuz, I don't want to mess things up while our technician is away 😉

Or, please can you specify what should I put in the extend.php just to end this Chinese nonsense

oontsa

luceos Hi, i can't even connect to my forum, the site says "connection is not secure" and mb i have some problems with my certificate. How should I resolve this issue? Tried to fixup forum by button at setting, but it does not work since today

luceos

CyberGene

What it does so far:

it checks whether the user is a new/fresh user based on join date and number of posts
attempts to identify the language used and only allows languages enabled in Flarum
scan for email links
scan for phone numbers
scan for web links
ignore domains provided in the allow list
scan both post content and discussion subject for the above
scan user bio if fof/user-bio is installed and moderates it (command is available to do that initially too)

For posts/discussions:

for subject spam the user will be immediately marked as spammer (requires fof/spamblock)
adds a flag for the post (or OP) if flarum/flags is installed (recommended)
it marks the discussion/OP for approval, flarum/approval needs to be enabled
if this is OP it will add a flag (requires flarum/flags) and mark for approval (requires flarum/approval)

I guess this package does need its own discussion 🙈

luceos

I'll fork it to Blomstra and make things a bit more official 😉 But please, please, please do give it a spin! It really helps.

Edit: moved to https://packagist.org/packages/blomstra/spam-prevention

I'll open a discussion later.

CyberGene

luceos But please, please, please do give it a spin! It really helps.

I just installed it. Something that wasn't very clear to me initially but I checked your code and now is clear, is whether the filter for user's age and number of posts are AND/OR-ed. Seems like if either the user is older than a certain age or has more posts, then the filter is skipped. With that in mind, I removed the age filter, so that users are filtered until they have a certain number of posts, regardless of their age. I tested it on my forum and it works nicely, posted some non-allowed URL-s, then tried with Chinese and the post were not approved, nice! This works for me now and I will still keep the FirstPostAproval disabled for now. I believe if some spammers manage to bypass your filtering, then I will enable the FirstPostApproval as a last resort.

Another nice work from you, thank you! 👏🏻

luceos

fakruzaruret it's free for everyone. It just doesn't show up as an extension yet.

luceos

fakruzaruret I'm trying to understand what you're saying, but not getting it. Can you clarify?

luceos

CyberGene then I will enable the FirstPostApproval as a last resort

If this happens I'd love to work on a solution that doesn't block/terminate every users first experience on your community with an approval. Let me create a discussion for this tool and let's collaborate on finding ways to ward off this spam, if I have to I might even build a Stop Forum Spam'ish like service to get this done; I'm just hoping we can bake in sufficient intelligence into one extension to handle the bulk of offenders without any outside services.

luceos

I've created the discussion and tried my best to clarify intent and behavior of the extension:

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/31524-spam-prevention

HelenL

I'd love to try this, I'm getting 20-30 of these per day now and they're only increasing. Unfortunately I'm in as "standard" an environment as I can get (whatever Debian/Ubuntu releases) and am stuck with PHP 7. Is the PHP 8 requirement hard or just the current environment tag?

Also composer is complaining about core 1.0.0 (I have 1.4.1 after update) and language detection 5.2.0, but current install used 5.1.0. Am I missing something?

[InvalidArgumentException]
Package luceos/flarum-simple-spam-tools has a PHP requirement incompatible
with your PHP version, PHP extensions and Composer version:
- luceos/flarum-simple-spam-tools requires php >= 8.0 which does not matc
h your installed version 7.3.31.
- luceos/flarum-simple-spam-tools requires flarum/core ¹.0.0 but it is n
ot present.
- luceos/flarum-simple-spam-tools requires patrickschur/language-detectio
n ⁵.2.0 but it is not present.

luceos

HelenL oh yeah this extension needs PHP 8 or higher.

lichengkun135

I actually checked into these spammers, these spammers are from Bangladesh (the Chinese they post are basically nonsense they simply embed their ads link in the post) and they seem to work in an organized way and find their forums from buildwithflarum.com. My solution is to use doorman and set up an invitation code that is only available in an exclusive place. I hope this helps.

halimjr

lichengkun135 I am from Bangladesh, and my forum is also flooded by this spam too. Spam coming from RACE ISP from across the country.

luceos

ctupramod feel free to install it as it is now an extension, no settings need changing for it to do its job. You can configure it to your liking when your technician gets back 😉