Hello, Scoop Help,
Can someone advise me how to deal with comment spam?
I saw Kelly Black's recent postings, but his method of
detecting lots of links is too sophisticated for me,
as I haven't tried to deal with Scoop source myself.
I'm hoping there's an easier solution.
I help run the Scoop site for the Young Mathematicians' Network
http://www.youngmath.net
and we are plagued by bots that create bogus user accounts
(like "yyy777") and post tons of garbage. It's such a pain
to weed it out, that we've kind of lost heart.
Some of the 'bots are pretty clever. For instance, they take text
from a story about the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM
06) and make a reasonable title like "all information currently
available about the ICM 06" and post about eight hundred links to
porn sites. Or the street address of the American Mathematical
Society. Or "Statement of opposition from the American Association
of University Professors".
Long ago we disabled comment privileges for the "Anonymous Hero".
I read the postings suggesting that maybe a few determined Chinese
spammers might be the source of the problem (and a recommendation to
block a certain IP address) but our comment spam comes from German
addresses (e.g., "eine wunderbare Seite") and French addresses as well
as Chinese addresses. So I suspect 'bots rather than people.
I'd appreciate any suggestions.
Thanks,
--Emil
--
Emil Volcheck
volcheck at youngmath.net