Lots of spam topics on forum

Can something be done to battle spammers? I've never seen so many on other discourse forums :/ Every day at least several topics appear :( Maybe some stricter registration? I'm not familiar with discourse moderation, but I hope there's something that can be done

This should be relatively rare, I've not seen much spam other than what needed manual moderation for as long as the forums have been up. Most of it gets hoovered up automatically before it needs to be done manually.

Not sure what is considered rare, but every single morning (around 9AM-1PM GMT) at least 3 new spam topics (sometimes 5) appear in an hour interval almost like a clockwork... Today is not an exception. I'm on several other Discourse forums and none of them have so many spam 😕

Honestly I've never seen so much spam on any of other Discourse forums I'm in. Actually I've never seen a single spam post on others. I bet there're some settings that could be changed 🤔 Maybe registration form could be improved by adding more security options or something? Doesn't Discourse have any security measures in place ready to use?

@Karmalakas, Your flags are appreciated and always approved.

The forum uses the Akismet plugin which filters already quite a few issues. It filters and sets aside suspicious user creation and posts. These users/posts are not shown on the site without manual approval. There are about 2-3 of these flags a day.

Early last year the daily amount of spam was really high (10-20 posts/day). That spam was quite predictable based on its content and user names. I then created a script that ran every 10 minutes to login, search for spam words, and flag these posts.

That type of "predictable" spam has gone. Nowadays, spam is much harder to auto-detect. I think these are created manually by people who are willing to create spam all day for a few dollar cents.

At the moment, I don't really see patterns and words that can be watched to block/silence users and posts.

Maybe some rule, that first-timer could not post links on their first post? At least if link isn't to Grav or GH for example 🤔 Simply show an error to user, because it contained links. That should stop trolls registering over and over if they can't post a link

@Karmalakas, I haven't found that option.

I can define words/phrases to search for and attach actions. However, links or using regex is not one of the options.

It may exist, but if so, I certainly have no access to these config settings of Discourse.

@rhuk or @djamil are more privileged and might be able to improve spam detection.

However detecting spam created by humans is very difficult to detect because they circumvent barriers. Eg. they create a legit account, post a few comments here and there and later edit the comment or create comments with spam.

@pamtbaau:
However detecting spam created by humans is very difficult to detect because they circumvent barriers. Eg. they create a legit account, post a few comments here and there and later edit the comment or create comments with spam.

True 😦

@pamtbaau:
@rhuk or @djamil are more privileged and might be able to improve spam detection.

🤞