I figured things would slow down a bit as there are no new podcasts to comment on. And I'm sure everyone is busy with all the holidays coming up. But I am bit shocked at the spam. I've always thought of G&G as "unspammable". But I guess spams happens.

I don't like the thought of the forums being locked :-o So IF the forums are locked, I hope it's until the holidays are over.

I know the podcast is over :-( , but the community is not :-)

I've noticed a spike in SPAM lately, but the couple messages I've tagged have been promptly removed. I think the moderators are doing a great job.

Rob and Matt have probably forgotten more Drupal than I'll ever know but I do have a couple of simple suggestions that might significantly reduce the SPAM problem.

1. Eliminate anonymous posts. I may be missing something here, but I really don't see why members of this community shouldn't identify themselves. It'll also eliminate those "that was my post" posts.
2. Require account confirmation via email as part of account setup. This will eliminate "fly-by" spammers

What do you think, Rob and Matt?

Respectfully,
Curt

Sad to say I haven't been able to spend much time here lately. I did clean up a bunch of spam comments today, but only because I got an email notification about a new comment on a thread I'd posted to before. I do know that Techmate cleaned up some spam recently.

Curt's idea may be a good idea. It would be up to Rob and Matt to make that call. However, it's been less effective lately. It seems that spammers have started beating the Turing tests by hiring low wage humans to replace their spam bots, at least for comment spam on websites. I've seen it on sites that require email setup, so I'd assume they're using throwaway email accounts for those.

It would be great to have a view (possibly with an RSS feed?) of comments flagged as spam. That might help alert the moderators to problem comments more quickly. (Or if one exists, fix permissions so we can see it.) I'll also try to get a little more active in the community again. I've missed it, and have some ideas for a couple of new tutorials, too.

Micah

I like the flagged comment spam RSS idea. Hopefully this can be implemented as it would help make moderation easier.

The spammers are more sneaky now. Looks legit at first glance:

http://geeksandgod.com/episode85#comment-64905

But it's spam

The whole comment spam thing is certainly annoying. The previous example in houseofbean's post is a good example. Perhaps, in addition to turning off anonymous comments, the rel="nofollow" tag should be applied to any external links.

Cheers
Pete