Some of you may have noticed my absence in the last couple weeks. This is because I just started my grad school studies and are finding course work to be heavier than originally anticipated. Currently, I am working on a research project about spam detection, which I am hoping I'd be able to one day bring a better spam detection system to vBulletin users -- you. As such, I am doing some quick field studies and I am hoping some of you could help me with some information.
Please note that this research is not sponsored by Jelsoft, or Internet Brands, and is completely aside from vBulletin in general, so please don't feel obligated to participate in any means. If you have useful information but coming from a different forum software suite, please do feel free to include them, too. Just state which software you are using if that is relevant though. If you are interested in participating, please fire me an email at andy.huang-at-vbulletin...(you know the rest).
The things I'm particularily interested are:
1) Do you use internal spam detection services, where you would process messages / registration locally without submitting to third party servers? This includes things such as email validation, built in captcha/question & answer registration, or key word based spam detection.
2) Do you use external spam detection services, where you would submit information to a third party server? Currently, vBulletin offers reCaptcha, and Akismet/Typepad antispam as built in solution. You may also have other third party addons, such as vBStop Forum Spam, etc. If you use a third party one, please also briefly describe how does it work.
2.5) If you do not use external spam detection services, why? Company policy? Doesn't trust third party black boxes? Don't know about their existance? etc.
3) After all the spam detection services you've put in place, approximately how much spam does your forum get on a daily / weekly / monthly basis, and do they get caught? IE: "I get ~50 spam posts a day, usually they're in moderation queue. I get around 1k new posts a week.", "I get ~10 spam posts a week, and they leak through my detectors. I get around 100 posts a week.", "I get no spam, because my forum requires manual approval.", etc.
4) If you could, please provide some of these spam messages to me by copy and pasting them into separate .txt files (IE: one spam post per file) and zip them up for me so the mail server doesn't automatically detect your email to me as spam -- I think including a password on the zip might also help the process if for whatever reason the spam detector decides to go into zip contents...
Thanks in advance!
Edit: For those that scans the footnote for email address -- -- please email the response to andy.huang-at-vbulletin...(you know the rest). Thanks again!
Please note that this research is not sponsored by Jelsoft, or Internet Brands, and is completely aside from vBulletin in general, so please don't feel obligated to participate in any means. If you have useful information but coming from a different forum software suite, please do feel free to include them, too. Just state which software you are using if that is relevant though. If you are interested in participating, please fire me an email at andy.huang-at-vbulletin...(you know the rest).
The things I'm particularily interested are:
1) Do you use internal spam detection services, where you would process messages / registration locally without submitting to third party servers? This includes things such as email validation, built in captcha/question & answer registration, or key word based spam detection.
2) Do you use external spam detection services, where you would submit information to a third party server? Currently, vBulletin offers reCaptcha, and Akismet/Typepad antispam as built in solution. You may also have other third party addons, such as vBStop Forum Spam, etc. If you use a third party one, please also briefly describe how does it work.
2.5) If you do not use external spam detection services, why? Company policy? Doesn't trust third party black boxes? Don't know about their existance? etc.
3) After all the spam detection services you've put in place, approximately how much spam does your forum get on a daily / weekly / monthly basis, and do they get caught? IE: "I get ~50 spam posts a day, usually they're in moderation queue. I get around 1k new posts a week.", "I get ~10 spam posts a week, and they leak through my detectors. I get around 100 posts a week.", "I get no spam, because my forum requires manual approval.", etc.
4) If you could, please provide some of these spam messages to me by copy and pasting them into separate .txt files (IE: one spam post per file) and zip them up for me so the mail server doesn't automatically detect your email to me as spam -- I think including a password on the zip might also help the process if for whatever reason the spam detector decides to go into zip contents...
Thanks in advance!
Edit: For those that scans the footnote for email address -- -- please email the response to andy.huang-at-vbulletin...(you know the rest). Thanks again!
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