Good to see you spotted this spammer.
MATLAB: How to hinder ongoing spamming
metaspamspammers
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In my opinion, captchas should only be required for initial account registration. If I can possibly avoid it with better spam filters, then I don't want to have captchas imposed on me. I post so much that it would be burdensome/punishing on me. Why should I have to be punished because of the spammers? Only force captchas on me if there is no way to have reliable spam filters. I know there are many spam authors now, much more than before, so I don't know if they have some automated account creation bot. It's been so long I don't recall if there is a captcha for account creation or not. If not there should be. I don't mind doing it once but I don't want to deal with captchas 300 times per month.
I agree that having editors disable/suspend accounts for review by Randy, John, or Kevin is a good solution. And if they have captchas there would be a small, reasonable number that we editors could handle. It also might be good if we could also add our own spam filter, at least until Randy reviews it, where we can have it automatically filter out all message with a certain term (web site) in it.
I think in the spam attack, a day ago, they lowered the spam threshold so much it pulled a few hundred legitimate messages (mostly old ones) into the spam quarantine. Those messages eventually disappeared so I don't know if they got deleted or put back.
I wrote a bot to delete spam from the quarantine but since it takes about 15 seconds per spam, it's not workable if there are thousands in there. I know Randy and crew have a way of mass deleting them, instead of one at a time like we need to do. I'd like that power to help.
The daily limit on new accounts is also a good idea. Or perhaps just a captcha on questions, answers, and comments posted by new accounts, but not by old accounts or accounts with more than, say, 10 reputation points.
lucas and others had a spam fest over the weekend that kept me busy. I deleted them almost as soon as they popped up. Here's the weekend roll call from the spammers hall of shame:
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5339238-lucas/answersnumerous spams fromhttp://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5315084-eurle-eurles/answersVery numerous spam byhttp://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5330497-alasterlo/answershttp://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5339096-daonha-nedtr/answerstons and tons of spam posts byhttp://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5338934-olradri/answershttp://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5303596-rushia/comments22 spam from http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5341101-cfd/answers2 spam from http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5341258-manalo/questions1 spam from http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5341003-salowinski/questions2 spam from http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5341258-manalo/questionshttp://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5341977-boom/questionshttp://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5340450-time/questionsAt least 8 spam fromhttp://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5339814-hari/answershttp://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5342356-ry/answershttp://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5341093-jane/questionshttp://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5342648-bill/answers
I've notified the Mathworks so hopefully their accounts have been disabled now.
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