Vaadin forum spams

I think Tori needs captcha badly…

Totally agreed.
(I write this while another wave of spam is coming into the forum)
If it’ll be done I would request a captcha though which doesn’t make you, as a non-robot, question your entire existence because of the fact that they are so cryptic. I saw a few which weren’t based on the squigly-line pictures which worked quite well, though i can’t remember a website that had them on top of my head.

Another possible (though probably more difficult to realize) solution could be things like:

  • A Moderating system similar to sites like stackoverflow where normal non-vaadin-employee users can remove Spam posts if having enough reputation
  • Making Marked as Spam more efficient. Either by automatically removing the marked posts if a specific amount of people marked it without reviewing it
  • Adjust (or create if it doesn’t exist) the spam filter to be more aggresive towards 100 similar post containing spam posted over the course of a minute

There are more but that’s what i could come up with right now and most of them are probably too complex to implement here.

I wouldn’t think as cryptic. Simplest solution is the best. Putting answering a captcha before posting a topic or an answer will surely beat the spams. This is also implemented in other forums I know.

Just to note – the spam problem has been noted at Vaadin. The Tori developers may be busy with other things right now, so they might not have an opportunity to add a proper filtering mechanism immediately. In any case, the latest attack seems to have stopped now.

Captchas are one solution, but should be really light on the brain; preferably even unnoticeable, such as some JavaScript/GWT solution that tracks mouse/keyboard. The spammers are maybe using some browser automation tool that also works in AJAX apps (Tori is a Vaadin app).

That or more strict captchas don’t help a bit if the spams are done manually, as they probably are to some degree – there’s already one simple captcha in vaadin.com registration. Labour is sometimes cheaper than robots. A scoring or user moderation system, perhaps something like Marius suggested, would probably be a good idea.

I’d really like to have
CAPTCHA like the one here
. That would be so educational…

That captcha is so educational indeed! :slight_smile:

Liferay (for which vaadin.com is based) has the same issues with spam on their forums, but they solved it by integrating antispammy and some other tools.

I don’t know it is an issue for Tori as much as it might be an underlying platform issue.

I just stumbled over this ux.stackexchange question which has a few nice alternatives like drag&drops, etc.

http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/50051/is-there-an-easier-and-more-user-friendly-alternative-to-captcha

The 3rd answer has a few alternatives linked.

I have this feeling though that some of the spam attacks might have been from humans copy and pasting the same text and creating multiple threads by hand. A Captcha won’t really stop them.

That’s why I’d love the Scoring/User Moderation system.
Another little but easier way to make it slightly better might be a limit of posts you can create in a set amount of time. No normal user would create 10 threads in 10 different categories over the course of half an hour