We will be enabling Akismet and Stop Forum Spam
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Hello everyone,
In response to an influx of spam users on this forum, we will soon enable Akismet for spam prevention. When you submit a post to the forum, Akismet will learn your IP address, user agent, referrer, and the site that you're commenting on (forums.ubports.com). Additionally, the Akismet service may receive your name (if set in your Profile page), username, email address, and comment data.
Users who have at least three reputation points will never be classified as spam on this forum. Users with five or more reputation points may report posts, which will send their content to Akismet as possible spam.
Please see (edit: https://akismet.com/privacy/ and) https://automattic.com/privacy-notice/ for more information about Akismet's privacy policy.
Additionally, we will enable Stop Forum Spam to check all new user registrations. This service will receive new users' usernames, IP address, and email address to check them against a spam blacklist. This checking will not occur retroactively for registered users.
Please see https://www.stopforumspam.com/privacy for more information about Stop Forum Spam's privacy policy.
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@UniSuperBox said in We will be enabling Akismet and Stop Forum Spam:
When you submit a post to the forum, Akismet will learn your IP address, user agent, referrer, and the site that you're commenting on (forums.ubports.com). Additionally, the Akismet service may receive your name (if set in your Profile page), username, email address, and comment data.
How very sad. Thus, this is my last post to this forum. I don't want my email address handed over to some third party.
Good bye,
Adelie -
I don't like either the idea that some other company stores (my/all) username + email + content of all post. Even if they claim it's for a short period of time and that they will not sell it. What is the business model of this company, from what they pay 800 employees in 65 countries?
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The company making Akismet is Automattic, they create all of the things listed here, including Wordpress.com, Simplenote, and Gravatar. Akismet is a paid service for commercial sites and free for noncommercial use. See https://automattic.com/ for more information.
Please note the following text from https://akismet.com/privacy/:
When Akismet is enabled on your site, only the personal data needed to carry out Akismet's core function of protecting your site against comment spam is collected from commenters on your site. We do not sell the data you send to the Akismet service, and we do not keep it for long. We have short retention periods of between two weeks and ninety days for the vast majority of our spam-related data, at which point it is automatically deleted from our databases.
StopForumSpam is a freely available service contributed to by its users. See https://www.stopforumspam.com/, https://www.stopforumspam.com/privacy, and https://www.stopforumspam.com/gdpr for more information.
Ultimately, the options are thus: we can enable these services for automatic use by the forum software, we can allow our moderators to use them on their own time to manually check every user registration on the forum, or we can lock the forum. The number of registrations on this forum bounces between five and ten per day, with many more during peak times. Waiting for a user to spam and jumping on it as quickly as possible is getting old, and the workload is getting too much for people who have other jobs to do.
We announced this change before it went into effect so people could determine if it meets their requirements and take appropriate action if not. Thank you both for your concern, I hope I've provided enough information for you to make your decision.
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@guru Well 1000s of web pages actually pay for this service, so their business model is to help paying users to block spam. I would agree that there is a potential if this would be a free service to sell of data from what they collect but with paying users its much more unlikely.
The problem is we cannot keep up manual spam moderation. We get an overwhelming amount of fake users registered to our forum by automatic bots, so we have to fight back with automatic bots. Simple as that. Or we let the forum be flooded with spam, that will make it unusable.
The spammers got all advantage in the world, its easy to write a spambot, but its hard to stop it.
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We have managed by mainly manual means to keep this forum, I hope, a friendly and safe place for all ages and people to use. This is becoming harder and harder to maintain using these methods, as has been described above by both @UniSuperBox and @Flohack.
Please remember we are doing and will keep doing this in our own time because we believe it is worth doing and worthwhile. However we now need to add in additional resources to maintain that situation. A decision not taken lightly. I hope this change can be appreciated for what it is, a way to keep the forum a safe and pleasant place to use for everyone and nothing more. -
Flohack said in We will be enabling Akismet and Stop Forum Spam:
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The problem is we cannot keep up manual spam moderation. We get an overwhelming amount of fake users registered to our forum by automatic bots, so we have to fight back with automatic bots. Simple as that. Or we let the forum be flooded with spam, that will make it unusable.
...Wouldn't it be enough to request that subscribers must give a mobile number, and enter a code sent to this by SMS (like
telegramdoes)? This forum at the end is about mobile devices. -
No. Among all the administrative headaches that would cause, programmatic SMS is expensive.
Also, have you seen how much spam there is on Telegram? Not a very effective blocker.
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Doesn't seem to work:
this post should have been marked as spam automatically:
https://forums.ubports.com/topic/3929/where-can-i-buy-nembutal-pentobarbital-online-whatsapp-1-615-475-7285 -
@Capsia, it's also not enabled yet
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@UniSuperBox Thanks, I agree we need something to stop spam.
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I'd rather ubports team spent time, among other things, fixing bugs, than cleaning up...
Since it's a paid service, we'll have more confidence in their ethics.
So it's a decision that may, at first glance, appear unpopular, but is in fact logical and indispensable: the survival of the forum is surely at stake ! -
This will lead to the fact that real world people, like I, will change their mail addr to nonsense and delete their fullname from the profile so their real identity is not stored together with the post in some 3rd party storage for whatever use or benefit.
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@guru, if that is what you feel you need to do, you are free to do so, assuming the forum software allows it. It would be illegal for either service to use your data for any other purposes than stated in their privacy policies, but you are free to do as you wish with your data.
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@Capsia
Thank you for the flag on this.
As you know it has been taken care of but it took time because done manually.@guru you are not forced to trust the solution, but the risk/profit has been weighted.
Personaly I try to keep things separated as much as possible so I have email address connected to activities, not my entire digital life... -
No, I dont trust in this and perhaps you noted the changes in my profile due to it.
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This post is deleted! -
I assume Akismet is triggered when the post contains a lot of links. I have had that happen to one of my posts also.
What I assume happens is that the moderators of this forum are alerted, and they review the post. No action on your part is needed. -
@ell1e First post with a few off site links from a new user will do it. Should settle down.
