Anti Spam-Bot Bot

[R834 3]

EDIT: Guests are no longer allowed to comment. Finally, an end to the spam! :D

Thought I'd share this in case anyone is interested.

If you use the feedback tracker, you'll probably have noticed a ridiculous amount of spam comments. This has been caused by the mods allowing users to add notes while logged out using a global 'guest' account, with no form of security at all. 100s of new spam comments get added daily, flooding emails (had to turn notifcations for notes off) and ruining readability of issue notes sections, making it impossible to follow conversations.

 

When the bots first started, I tried to manually delete the spam, but soon there was just too much to even attempt to delete. So, I decided to try and do something about this.

 

I wrote a fairly simple program in Python, which I now run whenever I can, which scans through issues, and, exploiting the fact that guest can edit / delete / set private all other guest comments, deletes the ones that seem like spam. Due to the sheer amount of spam types, the filter is really broad and deletes all guest comments with any links at all, with the exception of links to feedback.dayzgame.com.

 

This doesn't fix the email notification spam, but it at least keeps issues readable when you visit them, and all the spam is gone so nobody is going to have to manually delete it in the future.

 

If you want to see the result of this, issue 33 is probably the most obvious. The issue history at the bottom is obscenely long and filled mainly with updates from guest.  Large blocks of deletions can be seen occuring almost simultaneously where my program goes through and bulk deletes. 

 

Hopefully some security will be added very soon and the spam issue will be sorted so the feedback tracker will be back to being useable, but in the meantime, this should help clean it up a little bit. :)

 

(If for any reason the feedback tracker mods don't want me doing this, just tell me and I will stop running the program, however it doesn't do anything that isn't possible by logging out and manually clicking the delete button on guest posts!)

Edited January 13, 2014 by R834

[Guest]

Nice mate, I don't provide feedback because I am too lazy, but hopefully this is useful to some people :) 

[tansien 15]

They also allow you to upload binary files (programs) so there's probably a few steam account grabbers and trojan horses uploaded too.

[HIHBGaming 14]

They really need to disable the ability for guests to post on the Feedback Tracker. The spam I'm receiving from it is ludicrous.

[Rissou 42]

Watchout for the anti anti-spam bot bot bot :)

[R834 3]

Looks like they've finally stopped guests from posting, so no more spam :D

[Mdogg2005 447]

Watchout for the anti anti-spam bot bot bot :)

 

We need to go deeper.

[djporternz 644]

Also tried the manual method and gave up after an hour and all the spam reappeared as I was editing the post.

 

I'm surprised that they have allowed this situation to persist for as long as it has. But good work on your solution. Now I might consider going back over to the tracker again.