Anti-Spam Countermeasures

[Peter Walker]

Overnight, we had the first spammer join the board and they posted 14 adverts in various forums on the board. That user and all the posts have now been deleted. If you saw those posts, sorry but they have now all been removed. If you received them via email, simply delete those emails.

I had not set the User Registration security too high, in order to make it easier for legitimate members to join, but now spammers have found the board, I have significantly raised the anti-spam countermeasures to join the forum.

Now all new members have to be approved by the admin (Soroush or me) and their posts are moderated at first. On registration, they now have to give a justification as to why they want to join the forum.

The Stop Forum Spam system checks username, IP and email address against the Stop Forum Spam Database https://www.stopforumspam.com/ and denies those that are listed there and obvious spammers are added to that database. Their IP-address (the computer address they use to connect to the forum, this is not their email address) is then banned for a certain period to prevent them trying to join again.

Finally, an invisible Google reCATCHA test checks if the user is legitimate.

These tests will not prevent existing members from signing in, just those trying to register as a new member.
 

[Peter Walker]

As the individual posts from this forum are also automatically reposted to the Minutus Group on groups.io, those spam messages managed to confuse at least one member of that group into reporting the message to their Internet Service Provider (ISP) as spam. In this post, I am going to explain why that is a bad idea.

Why Marking a Message as Spam, Gets You Unsubscribed!
It can happen easily, you see a spam message in your inbox, it looks like spam so you click on the "Report Spam" button to report it, let's stop those pesky spammers.... 

The problem is, no matter how careful the moderators are, sometimes a spammer manages to spam a forum, YahooGroup or groups.io group (we will just say "community" from now on) and that message lands in your inbox. If you do not notice that the message was sent via the community you are subscribed to, and you then report that message as spam, that community is then declared to be a spammer and is added to all kinds of anti-spam blacklists. That is bad as then not just you, but a number of others subscribed to the same community no longer receive new messages, either. You have also just given some poor admin a massive job getting the service taken off a whole load of spam blacklists. I know as I have had to do this many times before, myself. Just one false spam report has often cost me up to 2 days of hard work getting the group back of the many blacklists there are out there.

And it gets worse, some people think clicking on "Report Spam" is a good way of unsubscribing
It is in fact the worst way as that community will definitely be added to all those blacklists and the admin is only sometimes able to determine who made the report. If not, then the user is not removed from the community and continues to receive messages and if the admin CAN determine who it was, he is going to be pretty angry about the next two days of removing his community from those blacklists. In such cases he is certainly going to throw you out of the community and might legitimately REPORT YOU to the Stop Forum Spam database. This will have the effect of making it very difficult for you to join any forums that check that database for several months. 

As to groups.io, they will immediately unsubscribe you from the group and you will be sent an email like this:
-----

Hello,You have been automatically removed from Minutus@rifegroup.groups.io because your Email Service Provider reported to us that one or more messages sent to you from Minutus@rifegroup.groups.io has been marked as spam.

We suggest that you check your spam box as soon as possible to see if your Email Service Provider has diverted other legitimate messages into it.You will receive no more emails from that group. If this was a mistake, you can resume your subscription within the next 7 days by clicking the following link: Resume Subscription

Groups.io groups offer several options for controlling how much and what types of emails to receive. See this Help Center article for more information.

If this happens repeatedly please check with your Email Service Provider to learn about how they decide to send feedback reports to list services (such as Groups.io groups).

Cheers,
The Groups.io Team

-----

If you receive an email like that, you have already been unsubscribed and will no longer receive any more messages. If this happens to you, click on the Resume Subscription link in the email to be resubscribed to the group and next time, be careful to check who you are banning before clicking that button.

If you have done this to a message directly from a forum like this one, write to the admin directly to put this right. The admin may just not kick you off if you apologise quickly.

Be Careful who You report for Spamming
as you might find yourself unsubscribed and reported.

----

If you want to Unsubscribe
On every forum email and group notification, you should find some instructions explaining how to legitimately unsubscribe. These instructions are usually found at the very bottom of the message. Just follow those instructions.

[anthony]

Thanks Peter for the great explanation of that whole process. I manage a separate groups.io group and have had members get that message a couple of times. Interestingly, they were both using emails containing the domain of a local isp (internet service provider). I think that some see the 'mark (or report) as spam' and unsubscribe as equal. Good job explaining the difference.

Also, ironically, the groups.io email summary I got with this message was put into the junk folder by MS Outlook (or the Office 365 exchange server). I used a plugin to 'report as not junk', so hopefully that helped things.

Anthony