asked
How to report a spam account
I've come across a spam account while looking at the Questions page. I know each individual post can be reported as spam. As this is a little bit of an annoyance, is there any functionality or system that allows the account itself to be marked as "spam account"? The account URL is
http://ask.sqlservercentral.com/users/7102/gloing38.html
This guy is particularly persistent. Surely there's a better way of preventing this sort of spam in the first place?
This is the trouble where you have a very determined human running something like this - it's very hard to lock them down (they've already changed their IP address to get past being blocked, for example) without making the site less pleasant for everyone else. We're trying to make it harder for them to get on the site, and for anything they've posted to disappear faster when it's flagged, but it's always got to be balanced with making sure we're not obstructing regular users.
WHERE UserName NOT LIKE 'gloing%' ? Of course that would only work in this particular case and probably only temporarily too. Spam is an annoying issue all over the internet. Hopefully you can get something implemented with good results without changing the user experience too drastically. But I'm positive that you will :)
it's a bot that changes it's IP address. They are all different accounts - the number at the end of the user name changes (in a semi predictable pattern - it increases by 3 or 4 each time it visits). Changes are being made to the site to prevent bot sign up and auto answering. Please stay with us while the changes are implemented
I'm quite proud to say that the last spambot attack was only visible on the site for less than three minutes. We got lucky - I was online, reading the site at the time it happened!
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