Forum is full of spam

flocsy🤠 said:

I have to admit that the "Garmin Forums Helper" Chrome extension doesn't help at all, in fact just makes things harder, because I not only have to click on each thread, but also an have to click an additional time to "post hidden (spammer)" before I can click on More > Report as abusive

I recommend disabling the option for hiding spammer posts, in the GFH Settings - that's of no use for the moderator, it was designed for the standard user who does not want to see the spam posts.

However, the amount of spam has to be blocked at the source - by the forum software. The detection and reporting by the user is just a complementary measure for catching the spam that passes the forum filters and anti-spam measures, but it cannot replace them. Well, I could add automated abuse reporting, but that would inevitably lead to some false positives. Still, there must at least some basic anti-spam measures added to the platform. I do not understand why the forum does not use any.

flocsy🤠 said:

However most of the spams anyway come from different users.

The current batch of spam reuses the same users, but I see old spammers coming back and posting under the same account again, quite often. 

flocsy🤠 said:

It's not a "big deal" for bots to create a new user for each post.

That's true, but it slows them down considerably, so instead of seing 2 thousands of new spam posts over the night, we would have to cope with a few dozens. After the registration they cannot post links straight away, so they have to create a dummy post first. This blocking of new users could be done even better than just that. And by blocking also the IP address of the spammer, you can slow them down even more.

However, if you cannot do anything else than reporting them for abuse, then we can only hope Garmin or the forum developer step in before the forum crashes or is abandoned by all regular users.

Brandon.ConnectIQ can you check the "Moderate user" permission? I see it in the menu, but have no permission to use it.

Indeed. Currently I see 5-10 spam every minute in https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/showcase .  I won't start a mouse-cat race with them until there's at least a tiny chance we can clean them for a while.

And now they started to spam also the IQ bug forum. In a few days the forum will be completely unusable. Fortunately seilogramp manages to keep clean at least the other parts (non-developer forums), otherwise nobody would come here anymore. I am going to report it to Garmin's Abuse form, hope they are a little bit more proactive there

The form is at https://www.garmin.com/en-US/forms/report-a-security-issue/ It may perhaps help if more people contact hem

OK, done. Reported to Garmin as a security issue at https://www.garmin.com/en-US/forms/report-a-security-issue/ 

trux said:

 It may perhaps help if more people contact hem

Done

trux said:

After the registration they cannot post links straight away

would it help if you disable posting urls for everyone? 

In all the years i've been active on the forum i can count the amount of times i needed to post a link on 1 hand i think and in most cases users could come away by posting a plain text link and then use copy/paste to go to the other url

Well, ideally only users with at least 10 posts could post links.

But if that is not possible, then here's a 2nd choice: allow only links to:

forums.garmin.com
apps.garmin.com
garmin.com
maybe *.garmin.com
github.com

This still would block a few legitimate links, but most of them would be OK, only a few percent of the legitimate posts would not be allowed, and I guess the users would then be able to post the link as plain text. Not as user friendly, but the other developers would be able to copy&paste it.