Thanks for the word.

Captcha... that's all I'm sayin'.

Spam? I didn't notice any spam.

{[R]}

Best of luck Thomas.

Most of my writing could be considered spam, please do not delete my spam.

So, you're saying we shouldn't buy drugs from those people? Damn.

Thanks--

Good to know it's being worked on. Many thanks for that.

merci beaucoup Tómas

Glad to see someone's on the case.

Also, MJwycha is right. Don't buy drugs from those people.

Yes! Attack of the 50 Foot Spammer.

Glad it's being addressed.

As most of them look not just obstructive, but illegal, this will be a good thing to have done with. Thanks for notifying all of us you were aware and headed in the right direction.

Ah, i got my fioricet in the nick of time.

What LCNeal says... but thanks for the word. This is a serious problem. We'll be looking for changes.

Thank you! Be gone Spam.

Do you mean I shouldn't expect my valium to arrive in a timely fashion?

sic 'em!

Well if the Levitra will get here I can shut down the computer and spend the afternoon with my wife in the bedroom.

Thanks for answering the mail. People were wondering if anyone was home!

Hire tinkerertink69. He can save this sinking arc!

Thanks Thomas.

Thanks, Thomas, sorry if we spammed you with Flags.

Glad you're on it.

ah fuggettaboutit...doesn't hold a candle to some of the flouncing we're seeing around here...

Thomas - check my post and comments - it started Saturday at 3:49am - it's not just today. The spam constituted 2/3 of the activity yesterday - I can't even imagine what it's been since then.

And also, check the comments for several programmers that are willing to help on the weekends to stem the spam tide in the future - it's Our hometown and we want to help!!!

Thanks for the update. It is much appreciated.

Finally, a cure for the SPAM plague!

Best wishes in dealing with these attacks.

Vast improvement. Thank you so much!

Thanks for letting us know - take care, Thomas!

Sunday, 8pm.
Oh no, not again.

huh-yep. Captcha. Multi-factor authorization.

But I appreciate the difficulties you are going thru and remain patient.

Thomas writes: "As all of you have surely noticed, we're dealing with a really unpleasant attack from spammers . . . this afternoon."

Thomas, this actually started on Thursday. Here is a post that at this moment is still around:

http://open.salon.com/blog/qufuvejokosa511/2010/05/13/buy_soma_online_soma_generic_carisoprodol_fabrications

Thursday appears to have been just a probe.

The main attack began Friday evening, NOT Sunday afternoon. We are now three days into a spam attack.

With all due respect, I think you guys have no idea of the extent of spam here. Comment spam is widespread. Sometimes when people with cover posts delete spam on the cover, the spammers, apparently in revenge, will trash many of their older posts, and it takes people a long time to clean it up. We even have spam accounts -- accounts that never post or comment, but that have spam links in the "my links" section. There are probably thousands of spam posts that appear to be legitimate, but have spam links concealed in the html source code.

In short, the whole place is being overrun with spam, and the resources devoted to it thus far have been inadequate. I know spam with always be around, but at this point it is out of control, and I'm talking about much more than the "online drugs" problem.

I was juuuuuuuuust about to check on cheaper Claritin - this Spring is killin' me! ;-)
Thanks for addressing it - and for addressing us.
Makes me smile.
Now...
GO GET 'EM, TIGER!! :-)

Thomas, it's okay, we're not angry at you, and I'm glad there has FINALLY been a response from SOMEONE up in the Ivory Tower to tell us, anything.

Like Trig says, hire me, I've got nukes and I'm not afraid to use them. I'll "reboot" a few spammers!!!!!!

:D

P.S.

I still think you have the forehead of a hat model!! Just saying.....

One simple thing the site could do to make it easier for people to clean up spam comments is to make "Manage Comments" faster. It must drag down the site because it certainly drags me down to click on "Manage Comments" and make every single one of the comments ever made to any of my posts appear on a single page. I bet 99% of the time people want to see the most recent comments, and if you paginated the results to only show the first 20 or 50 or even 100 comments, it would save you a lot of compute power and me and others a lot of wait time. (I've bug reported this through open.problems but it never got implemented.)

Another simple thing you could do that would virtually eliminate spam comments would be to disallow hyperlinks in comments from anyone but friends. That wouldn't stop people from making visible links in plain text, but I think a lot of the "art" of the spam attack is to try to hide these things and if they couldn't hide, it would be more obvious what they were up to.

A third thing you could do would be to allow people more options about what comments to accept. A comment review process that required us to approve a comment before it appeared would be simple to implement. You just have to make a button come up on the author's own page and a checkbox saying whether it's visible, so that only the author can set that box; others wouldn't see the box and wouldn't see comments that didn't have the box checked. Authors who want to be cautious could go into approval-only mode. Having to check a box would be way easier than "Manage Comments". And you could offer people the option to have comments auto-approved and just allow them to uncheck the box to disable the comment. (It's nicer than deleting the comment, too, because then for controversial comments the author can change their mind and make it come back later. And someone receiving spam can report it while still leaving the evidence around.)

The problem you have is you're not leveraging your tools, or not creating tools that allow you leverage. You have a whole community out here capable of policing itself and you've given them almost no tools for doing that. So they have to wait for your paid employees to exhaust themselves trying to keep up with the whole Internet. That can't work and you'll bankrupt yourself trying.

At the risk of redundancy, THANK YOU for saying you'll try. I certainly hope you're successful. And when you're done with that, how about rescheduling the daily down time (currently sometime between 4 and 6 Eastern) to an earlier slot?

...as of Sunday evening, nothing much has happened in the way of slowing down pharma-spam in the feed. Just to let you know that we noticed. Kent has some good suggestions and someone in my comments suggested the very simple step of requiring a visual word test to get a membership in OS - I hope that you all make some kind of effort to block this infestation.

CAPTCHA. That and blacklists of known spammer IP addresses and such. Spammers are organized criminals. They will stop at nothing. Look at how they've ruined USENET? There should be some very public arrests and convictions of spammers.

In any case, eternal vigilance is the price of keeping this open and excellent forum spam-free.

the curse of success I guess.
"that restaurant is too popular. nobody goes there anymore"
--yogi berra

if you guys would get a blog for your programmer(s), sure seems like that would be an advance. Ive been on here over 1yr, have tried to figure out who the developers are, nada.

Thank you.

What Harry said. We appreciate the courtesy.

Thanks for the comments. And I'll past your suggestions along, Kent.

As for the CAPTCHA, we do actually have a CAPTCHA in place in the registration process. It's unclear how the spammers are getting around it, but we're trying to figure things out, along with a way to automatically weed out the spammers and delete their accounts.

We'll have a better idea on how to fight this tomorrow, once more people are back from the weekend. Thanks again for all of your patience.

I just hope the solution isn't to make the commenting feature a difficult process. I hate on some blogs and Web sites when you have to go through a tedious process just to post a simple message. The great dialogues that are born in the comments section is one of the most positive things about OS and I hope any efforts to fight the Spammers doesn't have the negative side effect of slowing down legitimate feedback.

Having said all that, do spammers really find any success in their spam attacks? I suppose they must otherwise why do it? I always found it strange that people would think that annoying and intrusive ads (which is what spam is) actually works in getting people's attention and makes them buy stuff.

Any chance on getting a credit to my monthly OS membership fee, while this issue is being worked on?

Thanks for tackling this issue! Everyone deserves a good weekend away from work, so I'm sorry you're having to deal with this on a weekend (it's my birthday!). Just glad you're planning a counter attack!

I imagine your primary objective is to go after the pharm-bots (as well it should be!) but, while you're at it, could you please also tackle the Prada sunglasses/Louis Vuitton handbags crowd? They're just as annoying, if not as aggressive, as the druggies.

OK, off to order my Valium while I still can ;-)

Hi Thomas,
Monday evening in Australia and Recent is entirely drugs as I write.
I appreciate that you blogged on the issue and hope you find a solution soon.
It's a horrific ad for OS and I hope it doesn't do lasting damage.
Best wishes,

Another issue with the spammers is they are stealing comments made from real bloggers. This has happened on one of my posts and have heard from others that it has happened on theirs. I did a post about it Sat. with the link if you would like to check it out.

What Spam attack?

Thanks.

Thanks for responding to ALL of our concerns. Appreciated.

I STILL think you should consider hiring Tink (seriously).

He obviously doesn't have a life (Heh! he IS an IT guy) as is proven by how he hangs around this place all weekend , he doesn't have a REAL job (so pay him twice what you pay us and you're still way ahead) and he has nukes! Just think of it TommyBoy, NUKES! When you factor in his preoccupation with his worried about "contanination of his precious bodily fluids" he could be a regular old Dr. Strangelove!

If you let Tink blow up the entire computer network of China, and then let the whole world know he did it at YOUR direction, just think how many more views that will generate!

appreciate the update!

What hospitality. Come one. Come all. Awe.
I thought this was planned to improve mood.
It's a wild picnic on a Rh # rainy monsoon day.
`
I smiled when @ 1:32 Thomas said ` MJwycha right.
Don't buy any drugs from these people.` No steroids?
I thought that was O.S. Staff was taking.` Perk Up Pills?
`
I am pretending this is Red ANT Horde` Off Pink Peony.
The Red ANT invasion is hungry for our`Green Mint Jam.
I'm thrilled to share my Jelly Ham Sandwich` O, ANT JAM.
Aunt Annie's garden Peony ANTS comes visit `@ Open Salon.

O, the blogosphere is great free amusement. `O, lions, dandelion herb greens, garlic juicy swan curling scape.`O, Pine-nuts, olive-oil, lambs-quarter, and romanic kitty cats and pup`O, fleas fir lice itchy. Lady Bug and Red Ant Open Salon Editor's Annual May Heath Mushroom picnic.
Morel Season ended.
Soon it will be Autumn.
Listen to Antonio Vivaldi.
The Four Season Concerto.
He did THE RED PRIEST.
We need a violinist editor.
Editors sing`So long it's been good to know you. Maybe bang a banjo to perk melody mood.

Thank you for the work and the update. It's good to see it cleaned up, the Valium was getting tempting...

If we are going to all have some spam, could we at least all hop on a plane and go to Hawaii. It would be much more enjoyable there. :)
V

Hey, bueno! Thank you for putting out a word on it. And for tackling the problem. Gouge their eyes while you got 'em down, too, when the ref's not looking.

The pills are still coming though, right?

You mean we're not going to be a medical supply company?
Thank God, 'cause I hated working wholesale.

So ironic, that one needs a hacker to get rid of a hacker. Go figure.

Good luck -- I recommend hiring Blackwater to chase the bastards down and shoot them on the spot. If the assassins were charged, the company could claim they had simply followed them from Iraq, and no jury would ever convict them.

1st --- Bravo to Kent! I thought I was the only one having that manage comment slow down issue!!!! And the other suggestions too!

2nd --- to Amy, YES! I HAVE NO LIFE!! :D Soon though, I shall have a life, the spammers have contacted me, and I know their secrets.....JESUS JUICE AND PLENTY OF IT!!! ;)

3rd --- Captcha work great if the attack is by bots, if it's someone or multiple someones behind the keyboard doing this, then Captchas don't work worth a bean. It seems that this is the case, get enough people employed to register, post and repeat, you can get what happened here this weekend.

Solution, only one, give me a list of the offending IPs, I might have enough nukes, but if not, I can make more. I got contract with Iran!! ;D

Thanks, again. is being permanantly signed in part of the problem? Like, let's take the onus off of the server? I wonder.

Hi, Thomas. I suspect Tink is right about there being a human element in the spam attacks, and it doesn't really take much time to get by a series of CAPTCHAs for semi-automated spamming.

I'll second mishima's point above, that there are still a lot of innocuous-looking posts being put out that are pure spam: the text is copied from another source, such as a current news release, and if you look at the HTML source, it's dominated by invisible links (that is, text with style="display: none"). I don't know what spammers hope to get out of this (search engines are generally aware of hidden text tricks, and even if they weren't it would just increase the hit count for an OS page), but those posts are still worth filtering out.

A new spammer showed up today - Mary Lin. Can you block that one, too?

Anything you can do to solve this problem is hugely appreciated.

7:45e - I don't see ONE spam in the feed! YIPPEEE!!!

7:45e - I don't see ONE spam in the feed! YIPPEEE!!!

Oh good heavens, now I'm clogging the comments section...

AND my new laptop's clock is wrong! 7:18e, as it were...
'K, I'm done! I promise!

I think a blocking program is not only vital, but an insult to users that there is not one.

I thought I noticed an elevation in the feed content of late.

If OS can wrest a percentage, perhaps spam-sale drugs can be reframed as a source of revenue. Just trying to think outside the box.

Hey you better watch that favorites list over there - wouldn't want anyone to think you are playing, well, favorites :-)

Thanks for the words! Hopefully you will have some success.

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Have they no shame? Oh, the humanity!

oh no not another one, sick em Tink, go get'em! good kitty!

Shhhh, be quiet, we don't want to startle the beautiful and rare Zhong, who, back in the early 1990s, was a hit on Usenet with their "MAKE.MONEY.FAST" routine that made everyone go, HURRAY!!!! really, really loud.

Back then though, we were just amazed that a country across the ocean could piss us off with just a simple piece of spam planted through 1000s of Usenet groups.

**captures the spam and adds it to his collection of Spam from Across the Land** Wonder if I should share my shrimp salad ala BP recipe or this wonderful spam?

Probably do both!! Teeheehee!!