A Plea for Moderation

[vatas]

Moderator log on phpBB is arse, but I've deleted around 100 topics like that in the past few days. Either Loftar's "heuristic spam detection" or whatever he called it, has been completely bypassed - or forum is being targeted by someone who thinks that scam works better if you absolutely flood the platform with it.

[vatas]

If someone happens to know solutions/workarounds, feel free to call "skill issue" but currently:

1. I can't see which accounts have already been banned, leading to either redundant banning or missing one or more bot accounts.

2. No option to simply "permaban AND delete all their posts" - have to go to mod panel, checkbox every single thread (better not misclick or a legit thread gets nuked alongside) and repeat this for every single subforum.

[Fostik]

To my understanding the security on forum only prevents accounts with few post count to post URL's, so yeah this one which post coupons is totally bypassing it.

[Robertzon]

time to create official discord jorbtar

[Kaios]

The spam might have some relation to the high guest user count on January 24th. I noticed on that day there were more users online at one time than ever before and that can be confirmed by the updated "Most users ever online" portion of the Who is Online at the bottom of the forum home page.

I'm not sure why there were so many guests on the forum that day but that seems to be when the spam bots started to ramp up activity.

[mulamishne]

In a perfect world there would be a way to flag certain words, or words used together (ie temu and coupon) that would force it into a quarantine until approved by mod. No clue why they're so aggressive as of late but a few other forums I frequent have been temu bots lately too.

[Pills]

I suggested to Jorb & Loftar if we can change forum rules to require email authentication or something to be able to post to the forum, unfortunately they haven't been online in a while and I don't know if they can even set that up on this forum.

The mod tools are also pretty basic, atleast from what I have access to its a "delete one topic at a time" button, can't just click "delete all from X user". Its pretty much an unwinnable fight unless they come online and can introduce some new rule to people being able to post or just banned words to prevent posts even existing if they contain "temu" or something.

[Nightdawg]

I suggested to Jorb & Loftar if we can change forum rules to require email authentication or something to be able to post to the forum, unfortunately they haven't been online in a while and I don't know if they can even set that up on this forum.

The mod tools are also pretty basic, atleast from what I have access to its a "delete one topic at a time" button, can't just click "delete all from X user". Its pretty much an unwinnable fight unless they come online and can introduce some new rule to people being able to post or just banned words to prevent posts even existing if they contain "temu" or something.

You don't have some permanent ban button that also removes their threads?
You guys have been manually doing this? wtf

[mulamishne]

The mod tools are also pretty basic, atleast from what I have access to its a "delete one topic at a time" button, can't just click "delete all from X user". Its pretty much an unwinnable fight unless they come online and can introduce some new rule to people being able to post or just banned words to prevent posts even existing if they contain "temu" or something.

The default phpbb stuff tends to be mediocre at the admin level as well, the most you can add that I remember is censoring words

[SnuggleSnail]

can't just click "delete all from X user"

I am very surprised you didn't shit out a script that does that within the first 30 minutes of it feeling necessary