Last week we suffered a major spam attack on BecomeAnEX. The EX Team recognizes this attack was debilitating and caused a lot of frustration to the members of the EX Community. We’re sorry that it happened and hope that you didn’t receive too many emails and notifications as a result.
We’ve put some automated spam prevention utilities into action to try to prevent the site becoming cluttered with a whole bunch of spam. There are a couple technologies that will assist us:
- Limiting post frequency: If you post quickly together you may see a pop-up warning that you’ve posted too quickly. This time may vary.
- Spam-like content: Users who post content that resembles spam will be subject to moderation
- Links to External Sites: New users won’t be able to post links to other sites without it being moderated first
- Other spam prevention automation
As Mark has mentioned elsewhere, we cannot reveal *too* many details about how the spam prevention works, or else the spammers themselves may see it and know how to thwart them!
The spam prevention is done automatically so it will sometimes make a mistake and your post/comment may go into moderation. We realize this may be frustrating when this happens, and thank you for your patience. Computers and artificial intelligence aren’t perfect, so this may happen to you. We’ll work to release your posts/comments as quickly as possible when this happens but please understand that on nights, weekends and holidays, it may take a bit longer than during normal business hours. We’re going to also look into ways that we can prevent it from happening by adjusting the settings until we get it working in a way that is highly effective and minimally disruptive.
We won’t know exactly what the ideal configuration will be tomorrow or the next day, and there may be some ongoing adjustment until we can strike the right balance. There may be a time that we can be more relaxed on the spam prevention and other times we need make it more strict. Please understand when we make tweaks, it's in the best interest of keeping the EX Community spam-free!
We’ll continue to look at the resources available to us to help future attacks and will clean them up as soon as possible if they exploit the site in new ways. If you see something suspicious, please feel free to report it to us using the Actions > Report Abuse function, a Private Message with a link, or send an email to communityadmin@becomeanex.org. As with any website, don’t click on any site that looks suspicious.
We’ll also be having two live chats about Tagging, Organization and Reporting content next week. You can RSVP here: Let’s talk about Best Practices: Tagging, Organization and Reporting Content (April 25 @ 10am EST) or Let us talk about Best Practices: Tagging, Organization and Reporting Content (April 26 @ 8pm EST). The two chats will be similar, but at different times to allow as many members as possible the opportunity to participate.
Have a question? Post in the comments below.
Megan and the EX Team
