Fixing up FoF Spamblock

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

GreXXL

Please note that this topic is specifically about improving Spamblock as has an active bounty going on. Comments on FoF Spamblock and how to better modify the functionality are very welcome. If you want to talk about spam in general, or different extensions handling the spam problem I suggest to open a new discussion. By the way we have featured different options to tackle the problem in a prior community update. You are also welcome to discuss options there.

vn0202

Thanks

GreXXL

added a pledge to hopefully make this possible 🙂

IanM

GreXXL that's very generous of you!

I'll pick this task up 🙂

IanM

An all new FoF extension is now ready for testing & your feedback.

Introducing FriendsOfFlarum/anti-spam 🚀

This, once finished in it's beta period, will replace the existing extensions fof/spamblock and fof/stopforumspam, as it contains merged and improved code from both extensions. The features required for this proposal/bounty are also integrated into this new extension:

Screenshots

admin

forum

Development is continuing at pace on this extension, and is available now as a beta:

composer require fof/anti-spam:@beta

Ultimately, the goal is to introduce additional utilities to this extension to better fight the war on spam.

Please, give the extension a try, and let me know your feedback 🙏

CyberGene

IanM ~~Can I install this along the StopForumSpam and Anti Spam until it's beta? Or will they clash?~~

P.S. OK, I installed it and it automatically removed the two extensions, so the question is answered. I just zapped a spammer, however there's a small bug: the forum statistics widget got broken and I can only see a spinning circle instead of the widget. I believe it might be due to the widget having the deleted user in its cache and probably making a request into the DB for its alias or something and failing to retrieve it. After a while the widget got fixed, so I believe it's the cache indeed. I guess you should implement some guards inside the widget code to check for actual existence of the cached user.

P.P.S. Is it easy to add a shortcut to "[mark as] Spammer" action directly into a flagged post that has been detected by the Spam Prevention extension? I mean, when you open a flagged post and there are buttons to approve/delete, can there also be a button "Spammer" that will directly zap the user of that post and then refresh the page, so that we don't see the post/discussion/user if on screen.

IanM

CyberGene P.S. OK, I installed it and it automatically removed the two extensions, so the question is answered. I just zapped a spammer, however there's a small bug: the forum statistics widget got broken and I can only see a spinning circle instead of the widget. I believe it might be due to the widget having the deleted user in its cache and probably making a request into the DB for its alias or something and failing to retrieve it. After a while the widget got fixed, so I believe it's the cache indeed. I guess you should implement some guards inside the widget code to check for actual existence of the cached user.

Yes, it seems this is the case. I'll create a fix and patch the widget today 🙂

CyberGene P.P.S. Is it easy to add a shortcut to "[mark as] Spammer" action directly into a flagged post that has been detected by the Spam Prevention extension? I mean, when you open a flagged post and there are buttons to approve/delete, can there also be a button "Spammer" that will directly zap the user of that post and then refresh the page, so that we don't see the post/discussion/user if on screen.

Yes, it would not be too difficult to add this. I'd prefer not to add it just yet however. Once the extension is stable and out of this beta cycle, I do imagine integrating with blomstra spam prevention, so this could be handled at that point without issue 👍️

« Previous Page Next Page »