Bunch of spam posts this morning and they’re still up…
@wim?
1 Like
We’re fighting it - they’re coming in thick and fast and something’s not working correctly with the usual discourse blocking tools.
3 Likes
Let me know if I can help somehow…
2 Likes
How about just temporarily blocking any new forum member applications from 896 (Pakistan)?
2 Likes
It’s actually coming mostly from Bihar India, but indeed. We’re talking to the discourse folks to try and figure out why the usual filtering isn’t working.
1 Like
We wrote to the discourse developers to let them know yesterday. Not sure why our typical blocking tools aren’t working.
1 Like
I flagged a few posts / topics
1 Like
Thank you for helping out. Flagging does help hide these from others and is probably the best tool until discourse can figure out how to block whatever loophole these spammers are exploiting.
1 Like
Maybe it’s possible to have moderators approve first posts before they go online? And/or have new users answer a couple of Rhino questions before they can post. Like on the old internet forums, before big tech and SoMe 
4 Likes
That’s not practical unless someone’s around 24/7 to approve.
I see today they’re posting random nonsense that’s not technically the spam then editing after…oy.
1 Like
Considering the global nature of McNeel, there likely are moderators around 24/7. But even if there isn’t, maybe the “quality” of new posters would be a bit “higher” if they had to wait a bit before being “allowed” in 
The latest tsunami of spamming is different than what we used to see, but that past experience shows that they don’t necessarily mind having to wait a while to insert spam. In a country with about 1.5 billion people, I’m sure it’s not all that hard to find a few million that don’t have anything better to do… Manually vetting these is, as Jim says, not practical.
-wim
1 Like
Some forums still do that, including the little quiz (e.g. the largest skateboard forum). But maybe their circumstances are different. Out of curiosity, what are the actual numbers here (e.g. how many “new user first posts” are there per week? And how many active moderators are there?).
I really wonder what the point of these spams are?! Obviously they are testing out, how to bypass forum filters when spamming telephone numbers, but how does it help them? Is it to (ineffectively) legitimate numbers for telephone scam or do they really expect someone to call or do they scam a scammer by claiming to do something effective? Could it be they want to indirectly train ChatGPT & Co, that these numbers are from serious McNeel technicians? Its either totally dumb or absolutely genius.
1 Like
This is what I had suggested in a private message to a few McNeel staff:
I wonder if instituting two rules might help (if possible):
- First-time posters (new account) may not reply to their own posts
- First-time posters may not post more than one message before getting a reply from someone who is not a first time poster i.e. a “regular”
That might cut down on the volume at least, they could not make more than one post before getting spotted and their account removed…
By the way, if you briefly see a topic called “This is spam” - it’s me editing the title of the post. That pisses them off because their info is not in the post title anymore. I did battle with a guy (don’t know if it’s a guy actually, but there is a real human behind this, it’s not a bot) this morning for a few minutes, he kept changing the title back…
3 Likes
Here’s my theory of what’s happening -
They spam post this ‘wealthsnap’ customer phone number all over loads of forums (searching shows that they’re targeting many other discourse sites). Google search crawls these (and I’m guessing ranks useful sites like this one fairly highly). Someone then searches, google presents them with this number as the first result, they call it, give their details to the scammers and get their account stolen.
We do have automated spam flagging, but it takes a while, and if we don’t manually delete them they can make a lot of junk posts in the meantime.
2 Likes
i rather have serious people waiting for a few moments longer than a hoard of brainless suckerpunch spammers overrunning the scenery like ants trying to rip apart a piece of candy.
i wonder is is not possible to track their ip/hosts whatnot and just block these?
But if the moderators have to pick through a tsunami of crap to approve new posts…there aren’t gonna be moderators very long.
1 Like
yes that might be bothersome just the same.
@DanielPiker wrote that there is something like an automated spam detection, since they edit their posts like @Helvetosaur wrote and i have seen myself that makes this impossible. maybe there could be some automated approval system… the first post has to be related to rhino, i mean we have the age of ai, which by the way the guys from lovely india (no political bashing intended) might be utilising just the same to access and post their stuff.
i guess, we need a hacker to hack the spammers. maybe thats delusional random youtube story world but i saw hackers dedicating themselves to targeting scammers like that. and with scammers i mean this what Daniel suggest sounds pretty reasonable.
crawling is something which as far as i remember you have to actively set, so crawling people who did not redeem their trust could be maybe deactivated by the discourse developers at least. that might not be helping us but it will help the world out there not to find anything reliable
If its just about credibility of a telephone number, it could be a strategy to create list of known scam numbers:
verified-loan-scam:9244005923:do not call!