Fixing up FoF Spamblock

GreXXL

Lurker I do not agree with you - from the intention of this extension. While what has been summarized might be some exciting feature for the "normal suspension", I think it's not what "FoF Spamblock" should do. The purpose of this extension is to minimalize the work effort to get rid of a clear spam account (registered solely for the purpose of spamming). Like here on discuss, I have to do this 3-10 times each day. Any additional click that has to be done every time is far from ideal. Hence my proposal to set this once as an admin as a default behaviour for the community. Also ensures it's handled consistently.

Lurker

GreXXL he purpose of this extension is to minimalize the work effort to get rid of a clear spam account (registered solely for the purpose of spamming).

If I understood it correctly, your position on "Spamblock" is that it should be more automated when it comes to filtering the forum -- very much like how Akismet works; where:

Regular spam is automatically hidden for admin/moderator review, and
Blatant Spam is automatically deleted without the need for admin/moderator review.

But the proposed change is:

A. Regular spam (Soft Delete)

Suspend User and Hide Post/Discussion (default setting)
Suspend User and Delete Post/Discussion
Suspend User, Hide and Change Tag of All Posts/Discussions

B. Blatant spam (Hard Delete)

Delete User and Post/Discussion

Does this summary make sense?

Disclaimer: I'm not a developer. I just wanted to understand how this new feature proposal would work so I could support it better. Sorry for the inconvenience.

GreXXL

Lurker currently, the extension "Spamblock" adds the option to mark a user as a "Spammer" within his profile. This automates indefinite (sort of) suspension as well as the soft deletion of all posts/discussions made by the user. This is the current feature set - meant to automate specific moderative actions on clear spam accounts.

I would like options within the admin panel to change the automotive actions to either:

Suspend the user indefinitely and soft delete all discussions/posts made by the user (current method)
Suspend the user indefinitely and soft delete all discussions/posts made by the user and change all discussions tags made by the user to a selectable tag of choice
Suspend the user indefinitely and hard delete all discussions/posts made by the user
Hard Delete the user and hard delete all discussions/posts made bad the user

It's not Akismet or Stop Forum Spam (so it has no own spam detection) it's just the punishment / moderative action that gets automated. Likely for those that haven't been automatically detected and blocked anyways.

Lurker

GreXXL Thanks for the explanation. Now I understand it better.

I think it would be fair to say that a percentage of those who bypass the anti-spam system of the forum are users who “unintentionally” posted a spam. And for that I reason, I prefer not to soft or hard delete “all” their posts/discussions in the forum, but only the post/discussion that contained the spam. Because they might have contributed something good in the past that would benefit the community if the post/discussion remained.

rob006

Lurker I think that in that case you should not use "mark as spammer" option, just ban user and delete problematic post manually. This extension is mostly used for bots that post only spam, so it make sense to optimize workflow for that scenario.

CyberGene

Lurker I guess you don't use the Spamblock extension. It was meant to mark a user as a complete spammer and currently it has no configuration, so by default it would suspend the user and soft-delete all its posts. As you apparently can see, this was an extension meant to combat complete spammers, i.e. newly registered spambots/users whose sole purpose is to spam and who might also get detected by the "Spam Prevention" extension which is specifically made to scrutinize first few posts of new users, and will be bypassed for regular users. With that in mind, the asked change here (that I fully agree with) is to also provide the ability to completely remove the new user (not just suspend them) and hard-delete all his posts.

What you're talking about is rather some special case of regular users who might occasionally get their posts reported or detected by some other extension (e.g. the filtering one) and you need to only soft-delete that actual post. Well, that's already the existing functionality for flagged posts.

GreXXL

IanM implying that you would implement this - what would be a necessary goal to give this a chance of implementation?

IanM

GreXXL Yeah I'm happy to implement this, if there are no other takers. I'm pretty tied up with other tasks for the next couple of weeks however.

Personally, I think if we can raise about the same again, that would feel about right based on the effort required to implement these features

CyberGene

I've been invaded by spammers today and I've already seen that besides the already proposed options, I would also like to see the following:

On the all discussions page (when I can recognize spam even by the title) I want an option added to the discussion context menu to flag the user as a spammer
The same context menu when opened from within a discussion
When a post is automatically marked for approval by the "Spam prevention" extension, besides the option to "approve", "delete" or "dismiss", also add the option to mark as "Spammer".
- In addition to options requested by @GreXXL (hard-delete user, hard-delete all posts/discussion, etc.), provide a choice to also enable "Ban IP" (if the Fof Ban IP extension is installed).
When deleting a user, remove all his likes (if any)

To summarize. I need the easiest possible way for a one-click spam cleanup that I can do from any place (main discussion list page, or a discussion itself, or the post approval dialog) which will in turn do the following sequence:

Ban the user IP (optional, depending on FoF Ban IP extension)
Report the user through Stop Forum Spam (as before)
Hard-delete all user posts and discussions
Remove all user likes
Hard-delete the user.

I will sponsor with a higher amount if you agree on implementing those additional features.

Here are a few screenshots of what I mean:

IanM

CyberGene you know, I'm actually starting to wonder if we shouldn't consider combining some of the spam extensions into one, fully-featured solution with configurable options as far as is possible.

I think it would make sense to combine

fof/spamblock
fof/stopforumspam
blomstra/spam-prevention

But leave fof/ban-ips as a seperate entity, but extended so that the new spam extension can make use of it's features.

This would entail quite some work to complete, but I think the end result would be of huge benefit to the ecosystem 🤔

GreXXL

Thank you for engaging with additional ideas. I think managing Spam efficiently is of great importance. Having more ideas is a good thing - so this gets even better.

CyberGene On the all discussions page (when I can recognize spam even by the title) I want an option added to the discussion context menu to flag the user as a spammer
The same context menu when opened from within a discussion

I do not agree with those to suggestions (at least not exactly). I think adding this to the menu would be inconsistent. Both menus are meant for actions on the discussion and not on a user. It might be unclear which user the action is targeted for and cause problems.

It might be more complex but what I could think of is that you create a context menu when clicking either the avatar or the username. But I would refrain from mixing discussion and user actions.

IanM What would be the benefit of moving it in one extension? I know from talking to @luceos that having big complex extensions creates issues when maintaining them. Wouldn’t it be beneficial to keep them small in scope to make them more easily maintainable?

CyberGene

IanM completely agree with that. And I think we should communicate this idea with more people, so that we can sponsor it as a group. But it's totally worth it to have a more streamlined spam prevention 👍🏻

rob006

GreXXL Wouldn’t it be beneficial to keep them small in scope to make them more easily maintainable?

In general It is easier to integrate multiple functionalities with each other if they're in single repository and not scattered across multiple extensions with different versions.

MikeJones

All I can say after last night I am ready for better and easier spam management. TO many clicks to mark them as spammer delete their posts then delete the posts again so they are no longer visible to me :-)

CyberGene

MikeJones Yeah, exactly. Previously I had like 1-2 spam discussions a week. This morning I woke up with around 7-8 and while I was going through them and the corresponding user -> ban IP, mark as spammer; delete discussion forever, delete user permanently... I got new spam appearing in the meanwhile. So, a one-click solution would be best, even if it's a bit confusing, I agree with @GreXXL that it might not be very intuitive and logical to eradicate spammers through discussions context menus but whatever makes it easier and a one-clicker, I would take it.

Zeokat

Lately my forum is also focused by spammers, at this moment is hard stop them with actual extensions.

Seems that reCaptcha v2 doesn't stop them.

CyberGene

Will any registration measure such as a human-check challenge stop them? Like “how much is two plus three?”, etc? I’ve seen those on some forums but don’t know if they are any effective. I imagine this like a very simple extension with 10-20 admin provided questions and answers. Mine is a music forum, so e.g. “how many sharps are in the E major scale?”, so the hackers can’t easily reuse a global table but will have to adapt to custom forums around the world, which will at least stop script bots for some time until the admin updates the questions.

Zeokat

CyberGene Yep, that extension is very effective. I had it on my old MyBB forum and the spam was mostly 0.

Jishnu

In my experience telegram have the most powerful automatic tools to prevent spammers. It will be great implementing such automatic feature based on other users spam report .

If certain number of users report a user as a spammer ==> automatically delete all his discussion/comments or disable that and move for manual check

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