Serious Spam and Ban management issue in ACP for V4

[wimg]

As this is not considered a bug, it at least is a very serious flaw.

See also here: http://community.invisionpower.com/4bugtrack/ACP-members-r1251/

There is no option anymore in the ACP to deal with multiple members simultaneously, like spammers.

This is a must when managing boards with more than a few members.

This is not a suggestion, in my view it is a bug. it works in 3.4.7, and has been there for many years in 3.x and before, so it not being there now is a flaw, and not a suggestion even if the remark was to post it here.

In this day and age removing such functionality is not the best of moves. Not even the best spam trapping functionality will deter the spamming community, and therefore we need tools to deal with them. Removing those tools is therefore a serious flaw.

Do also note that there are real users out there using, e.g., ip-addresses (Singapore and Hong Kong come to mind) which are pooled, and many of those are listed in spam databases. In short, one has to let those through, it also means dealing with all those who are spammers.

Having the old functionality is a necessity, not a luxury, or "improvement suggestion". It s a fatal flaw. Please add it back in.

Regards, Wim

[Marc]

Hi Wim,

Although I cannot comment on the development of the software directly myself (I will let someone else answer who can give a better answer than I), please understand that the reason this was removed from the bug tracker as "Not a bug" is that we have to ensure that we keep that area for areas where there are items in the software that should be working however are not working as they were designed. Omissions are not bugs and therefore do not belong in the bug tracker as such. It is however good than you bring up these things and we encourage people to do so as always.

[wimg]

Thank you, Marc.

I'd like to give an example: today I removed approximately 180 spammers, which we incurred over a period of 3 days, despite all the current spam filters we have set up.

Fortunately that was in 3.4.7, so I could do a page at a time, well to a degree.

There is another issue with this: when deleting spammers, all of their topics, posts, messages and everything else should be deleted as well, otherwise they still show up as Guest posts. Currently, posts and topics stay if you don't delete them manually and individually first. As half of these guys or bots got through and managed to post one or more messages, this is a real pain.

To be very honest, omitting this functionality is a real flaw, as one can just not rely solely on spam filters and such, and that is why I brought it up as a bug. To me it is, whether it supposedly works as intended or not.

We started first using spam filters not long after we'd upgraded to 3.1x, quite a few years ago now, as manually removing them properly was a major task. We did this just in time, not even a week later instead of 20-30 spammers a day we went to about 300. Without the spam filters we would have needed several people fulltime in order to remove all of those.

Now, about 4 years later, most are intercepted, but even so, we'll get anywhere between 10 and 100 a day getting through, with about half of them getting though validation. All of these have to be removed. It now is partly manually, and mostly semi-automatically, thanks to the existing, in 3.4.7, multi-select functionality. In 4.0, we now have to remove them all individually - that can't be true, we hope.

This alone is enough for us no to be upgrading, until such functionality exists.

Thinking about it, we also did a major reshuffle of our forums, where the largest one was halved approximately, size wise (still is the largest, but only barely), and the topics we split off we moved into 6 or 7 new (sub)forums. I do hope, still have to check, whether the multiple select still exists for moving topics as well, because this was an exercise by the entire team, and took 3 weeks to complete. I don't; want to think about how much time it would take if we would have to move one topic at a time.

Ok, got a fright, and checked: that doesn't seem to be possible anymore either, unless I am completely overlooking it, that is not in searches anyway.

Please let me know where this functionality resides, in searches, if I am overlooking it, and if it doesn't exist, I'd like to know if it will be included or not, in searches, ACP, and any other relevant place where it is no longer present.

Kind regards, Wim

[Stuart Silvester]

Hi Wim,

This is precisely what 'Flag as Spammer' is for. You can configure it to remove posts for the last X days. So that when you click that button on a hovercard/profile boom. That's it. nothing else to delete.

I recommend having a look at the settings, it would save a lot of effort

You may also benefit from reviewing your spam service settings and adjusting those as required.

Stuart

[wimg]

Hi Stuart,

Will it actually delete everything with regard to these spammers, and leave no trace at all? And can I remove multiple spammers simultaneously?

IOW, no messages, topics, PMs, watched topics/forums/whatever, status updates, you name it, for all of a set of those spammers?

And the same for banned members?

I cannot find any option to do so, not in a multi-select way as in 3.4.7.

Do note that I mentioned that there are people who are considered to be spammers by the spam databases, which aren't spammers at all, but only get treated this way because they have, e.g., an ip-address from a pooled set, which may be considered to be a spammer's ip-address.

BTW, there was a setting in 3.4.7 for the number of days to be deleted or hidden, I cannot find such an option in 4.0.0.beta4b 67c17.

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards, Wim