Debian User Forums

Over 17,000 actual, honest-to-gawd spam attempts per day????

Seems unlikely.

dasein wrote:Over 17,000 actual, honest-to-gawd spam attempts per day????

Seems unlikely.

Well, spam "hits". Bots will generally go throguh a process of a few pages before the spam is actually posted (register, update profile, post spam) etc etc - the smart bots will check whether their action is successful - but for the most part - the bots aren't smart - and will just spam the actions at the server - hoping that they're getting through.

So the number given is attempted spam "hits" - whether that be as the initial part of the process or not.

dasein wrote:Over 17,000 actual, honest-to-gawd spam attempts per day????

Seems unlikely.

I believe it. I help moderate another website and it gets hammered. It's bots that do it. As Mez said, the number is attempts, not successes. We would be buried if we did not have a good anti-spam mod. The one that has been added to Debian User Forums has made a big improvement.

Bulkley wrote:We would be buried if we did not have a good anti-spam mod. The one that has been added to Debian User Forums has made a big improvement.

But we didn't have an automatic anti-spam widget in place a month or so ago,and I was part of the small group who fought the problem manually. I can't speak to other venues, but I am confident that FDN did not have anywhere near 17,000 spams per day, not even on the worst day we ever had. It's off by at least one order of magnitude.

The "overcounting" explanation makes much more sense.

dasein wrote:

Bulkley wrote:We would be buried if we did not have a good anti-spam mod. The one that has been added to Debian User Forums has made a big improvement.

But we didn't have an automatic anti-spam widget in place a month or so ago,and I was part of the small group who fought the problem manually. I can't speak to other venues, but I am confident that FDN did not have anywhere near 17,000 spams per day, not even on the worst day we ever had. It's off by at least one order of magnitude.

You dealt with what got by the Captcha. Bots keep trying until they get through. Attempts will always outnumber successes.

There was always the infamous "middle number" question.

Wrong answers for that would presumably count in that 17,000.

One or two of them might have even been bots...