MATLAB: How to hinder ongoing spamming

metaspamspammers

Good to see you spotted this spammer.

Best Answer

The 2 spam bots below assaulted the forum last night with over 1200 spams - a new record I think:
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5497328-jib-ji
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/contributors/5497771-sk-sharma
I spent an hour last night deleting them but just couldn't keep up and woke up this morning to over a thousand spams. If they're not going to give trusted editors the ability to suspend accounts like that then I think they should at least require some kind of captcha for accounts with less than 20 reputation points to limit the ability of bots like these to do what essentially is a denial of service attack on the site. With page after page of questions being nothing but spam, we can't find legitimate posts. It's not fair to the legitimate posters and it's annoying to us who want to help them. If someone has proven themselves and has some minimal number of reputation points (like 10 or 20) then the captcha should not be required. I've never seen a spammer with more than about 2 or 4 reputation points (typically when they accept each other's spams). Steve Eddins has a crude captcha on his blog but it seems to work.
So, in summary I think the ability for trusted editors to suspend/disable accounts would be best, followed by captchas for low-reputation accounts.
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