Spam outbreak in the Community

Question

Ugh...we got hit again late last week and into the weekend.

One of the spammers followed me and then began posting, unmoderated, because they got points for following something.

I've raised the point threshold for unmoderated posting from 1 point to 100 to try to combat this, but that may be a temporary solution.

-Jeff

Jeff_Perkinson · Answer

So, my attempt for last night was only partially successful. It appears that most (all?) of the spam we got last night was in the  space.

See https://community.jivesoftware.com/casethread/385330 for the gory details but the short version is that I forgot that the global moderation I was setting applied only to the spaces that inherited from the global space, and we broke the inheritance for  and others.

So, for tonight, I'll have to modify the moderation settings for  and the  and probably a few others as well.

Since I'll be in Seattle for JSM on Monday and Tuesday, I'll need someone here to be responsible for changing the Moderation settings then. We can discuss shortly.

Jeff_Perkinson · Answer

Well, that wasn't a very good night or morning.

I put the site into maintenance mode about 6:00 AM this morning and opened a case at Jive: https://community.jivesoftware.com/casethread/385183. I asked for some forensics into how they were getting around our moderation controls. The claim it's a bug when advanced gamification is enabled. I'm not entirely convinced but they are recommending an upgrade from 7.0.2 to 7.0.4 where they say the bug(s) are addressed. We've opened a case for that upgrade as well and asked to fast track it.

Overnight tonight I'm going to enable moderation for EVERYTHING using https://community.jmp.com/admin/community-moderation-settings.jspa?communityID=1&community=1 turning everything on.

Hopefully that will cause everything to be moderated. We'll see.

If not, or if leaving that on overnight each night is a problem, we should think about turning off the advanced gamification until such time that we get upgraded and can reenable it.

Jeff_Perkinson · Answer

ryan.dewitt, based on the message above regarding status points that means that we don't need to zero out the points of the spammers from last night. Sorry if you've already done that but if not, don't worry about it.