Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Story& Character is flooded with spam

I enjoy banning bots, I'll help. >.>

These forums are super outdated and managed by volunteers - find the fault...

I know, I’m just trying to be communicative with respect to the forum’s needs.

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General Comment: I do not make decisions on who can or cannot become a moderator. I’m the new guy and my main priority right now is keeping the forum clean.

Geez, Zerubbabel. We didn't have any of these problems until you became a moderator. Coincidence?

I'm secretly a Dubai Call Girl.

Hi folks, just letting you know that the Larian community management team have just confirmed to me that controls around new user registration have now been tightened up so it will hopefully be harder for spam bots to get in. Fingers crossed!

There may still be some lurking so we’ll keep our eyes out and try to nerf them asap. Thanks to Zerubbabel for bearing the brunt of repelling spammers over the past few days!

Where's Gateway Timeout when you need him?

Larian, please secure your boards.

We need to be proactively blocking any thread with a 10-12 digit phone number in it's title, or phrases like "call girls" the same way we'd autoblock offensive slurs in thread titles.

Even if they beat your registration captchas on these ancient forums, no user should be able to post a dozen new threads every couple minutes without an automatic suspension pending review.

All these spambots are new users, so whatever was done to tighten up the registration doesn't seem to be working.

Oofs, woke up to more spam. I don't know what the experience is like admin'ing/moderating a forum so best of luck to y'all.

Yeah, a thread limit should be good, maybe until it dies down. I don't think people other than the ones who are botting are posting more than >3 threads an hour. Maybe someone at stranger level can only post 3 threads until further review? Not like I know what implementing that looks like to all of you though.
I could extend help testing your spam rules if you need it - don't think it would be too difficult to write a bot in Py + Selenium. But I'm sure y'all have that covered too.


This is the funniest thing I've read this week, though it's only Tuesday

I recommend we all grab our pitchforks and torches and start chasing Zerubbabel!

Sleeping on the job tsk, tsk.

Transparency time:
In my understanding, moderation and IT are actively working on the problem!

Heheh looks much better already!

For stranger danger, I would suggest limiting the ability of new users to create a thread immediately upon registering. That is a fairly common practice. Meaning you'd have to post a couple posts in existing threads or wait 24 hrs before you can barnstorm in as an OP.

This would discourage spam and provocateurs, and make the boards generally easier to navigate.

I'd also reserve the animated emojis in thread titles only for Moderators. Clapping Santa hat smilie is overstaying his welcome. It's only Sept! That dude should be at the north pole for another two months at least.

It says we're running UBB 7.7.5 but then I'm not sure what that actually means for boards that have existed for this long? There are posts here dating back to 2003.

It could be that there are built-in administrator tools to help with this stuff, but these may need to be activated or something? I don't know, I don't envy your job, it seems daunting. But we appreciate what you do!

Thanks!

At least those two ads somehow make sense together

I always imagined the Dubai Call Girls would be prettier.

Larian are still working on a solution to this slew of spam. The measures attempted on Friday to prevent spammers were completely effective. Unfortunately because they made it impossible for anyone at all to sign up for an account . The changes therefore had to be rolled back until that could be investigated and a solution put in place that is somewhat less nuclear!

Maybe in Patch 3 Larian could introduce more localisation on the call girl front to save on the phone bills?

How does the whole call girl thing work? Are you supposed to go to Dubai or call them on the telephone?

It's very socially conscious spam.

That's how they get ya.


You seem very interested in the logistics and actualization of my mortal enemy.