chat spam

[Rex Fisher]

are we now getting chat spam?
18 Feb 11, 09:35 AM
here is the time stamp that concerns me.

[Webmonkey]

Both fortunately and unfortunately, the chat box is open. Any visitor can chat with us - which has proven pretty helpful from time to time of late.

However this also means that any bot can scan and spam us.

That means, use good judgement. Don't click on links you're not sure of.

Here are the other options besides the common sense stuff above:

Closed chat. Not available with Cbox. This means I'd need to find another option where membership is required. This would mean visitors couldn't chat with us without registering first however.

No chat. If the resource isn't useful, then I guess it could go. Plenty of folks have their own chat programs.

Some kind of middle ground. Maybe there's a chatbox app that is better at denying bots but still offers open posting. Research required.

Thoughts?

[Decimus]

Occasional spam is tolerable for the openness it provides. Leave it as is, in my opinion, and people can just not click on links that The Admiral (You know whom I speak of) warns us against.

[Rex Fisher]

I dont know if this is true, but i am under the impresion once you start getting hit by the "bots" you get hit more and more...i if this aint true i guess its no big deal, on the other hand if it is true, we may need a plan...

[Evan]

+1 To both recent sentiments. If this is the worst of it, meh. Let's keep on keeping on.

If it gets unmanageable, we should look into other options or tanking the widget for the safety of wild link clickers.

[Decimus]

We had chat-spam before the chat box went down previously, and when it was down for what... a week or two? it all seemed to clear up for months thereafter. Just a thought if it does get bigger.

[Webmonkey]

To Jeffrey: I'm not sure that I can directly correlate that to the experiences we've had. I don't know if we're 'on a list' for example. There are applications out there sold by spammers to other spammers that spider the web looking for certain search terms (like chat) and then if they find pages with a chatbox, a second program (or another feature of the same) dumps a short spam message with a link. During the spidering process if the URLs are saved, and then sold to other spammers, the amount of spam could grow. This is more or less the same way email addresses are collected for email spam, only most email services have elaborate filtering schemes to get rid of them or shunt them to other folders. This Cbox service has no such elaborate scheme (obviously). Perhaps other free or cheap chat programs do, which would be option 3 from my first response, but requiring more research on my part.

To Evan: Yup, always an option if it gets totally out of control.

To BLewis: Huh, interesting thought. I'm not sure if I can directly correlate that or not, but if it comes to shutting down the cbox to throw off spammers at that point we might as well look for another solution anyhow IMO.

The difficulty with finding another chatbox provider is that I am somewhat limited as to what I can install to a proboards site. Since I can't mess with their back-end servers and add our own chat database, I have to find a solution that hosts it for us. Cbox does this. THe other issue is that every freebie chatbox says they have spam blocking features, but most of them really don't according to reviews. Or do, but only if you can install elaborate stuff which I can't because of Proboards being stingy with their database access. Coincidentally, this same stinginess greatly limits the amount of *messageboard* spam we get though.

[Ophelia Tempest]

I like the idea of like a chat you can only access with your ECC sign in info or something. If someone is interested enough to ask a question it takes about 5 minutes to sign up for an account. Or even require a code if you aren't signed in - like what you have to do to post as a guest on the boards, to prove you aren't a robot?

Thanks for your attention to this, Chris :] Best Webmonkey everrrr.

[Webmonkey]

A sign-in only chat is another option o'course. One thing that would be a toughy would be to find one that would carry over Proboards sign-in credentials, however now that you can link your Facebook or Google log-in to your Proboards account, and your Google to your Twitter, and your Facebook to your Google, etc etc... I expect that will become easier.

As a side note, the re-vamped vampire main site will be able to use your Facebook log-in, just like Proboards does now, so you'll be able to log-in to both Proboards, Facebook, AND the Vampire site with the same log-in, which is hotness.