AI Spam

[theskyhound]

I guess it was just a matter of time, but here we are. The primary way that I keep spam off this forum is to ensure that a new poster makes a reasonable post before they are accepted. Unfortunately, people from certain parts of the world are now using AI to help them make these posts. Their posts are still pretty obvious, but I have had to change how I determine what is "reasonable" as a result. Posts from new accounts that contain no useful information (me too, excellent response, etc.) are now being summarily deleted. It is possible that I may be deleting a few that are legit. 

If you are new here and want to fit in, please consider introducing yourself. Tell us about the kind of astronomy you do and about the equipment you use. Note also that we have a discord.

[PMSchu]

Greg, it's a shame that we can't have nice things it seems. What's the point of spamming this forum? Stupid yahoos.

What a waste of your valuable time to clean that junk up.

Phil S.

[theskyhound]

The latest thing is that people create an account and then respond to a thread by quoting several previous posts. The response will be something innocuous, like "I followed the same instructions and it worked for me, Thanks."  But if you look closely at the quoted text there will be a link hidden in there. I can't imagine how hiding a link where nobody is likely to ever see it is worth all that trouble. But if you see one of these links in a response let me know and I will push my giant red button and make the accounts and their posts go away forever. And of course, never follow the link.

[PMSchu]

Greg,

Since I read every post on this forum, I'll let you know if I spot any suspicious links hidden in posts.

This is really sad.  

Phil S.

[razvan]

But if you look closely at the quoted text there will be a link hidden in there. I can't imagine how hiding a link where nobody is likely to ever see it is worth all that trouble.

It's not intended for human eyes to read it but for the search engines. Since its early days, one of the main variables used by Google to rank a web page was the number of incoming links to it from elsewhere ("many web sites link to this page, therefore it must be useful and I will show up higher in the results"). It's a very common technique with blog spam as well. Most if not everything is typically automated and done at a large scale, so the effort is minimal.

The wikipedia entry on comment spam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_spam) is a starting point for more info and countermeasures.

[theskyhound]

Oh, of course! (slaps forehead). That makes a lot of sense!

[theskyhound]

So here is an example of a spam message posted by a new user here on the forums:

"Greg, quick question – does ST4V actually contain the RCW catalogue of HII regions, or is it only limited to the Sharpless ones? I’ve been trying to cross-check some objects but wasn’t fully sure if RCW entries were included. By the way, totally off-topic but while digging through this stuff I was also playing ..." followed by a link. And poof they are gone from the system. No mercy.

This is why its annoying, because I have to read and consider carefully every message, and sometimes they can hide those links pretty well.