Topic: [Newbie scrutiny instead of jail] Every new user's first post: loyce.club/patrol (Read 1104 times)

I was reminded of this thread, so it deserves a bump. Unfortunately, it still nows most first posts aren't worth reading.

That's intentional: every user who posts shows up once, because every user can be a spammer.

That means he hasn't posted since I created this topic, and indeed, he just woke up from October 2020.

Correct. I'm just surprised how many old users are still waking up to make their first post in years.

Hey, nice tool! I've had a scroll through and I noticed that some members who aren't actually posting for the first time are showing up...so it's a little hard to distinguish brand new members from members who aren't brand new. Adding the member rank, activity and/or post count at the time of the post could help distinguish this easily without visiting each post and checking.

For example, user BitDials has over 108 activity and this post showed up in entry 11 (at time of writing):
https://loyce.club/archive/posts/6172/61722610.html

It's not the first post from this user (far from it) but in the list you would not be able to tell in any way until you actually go and view the post.

Bump! Go report some spam

I can think of legit reasons, such as a user who's trying to get a technical problem solved. But if I look at the 10 latest entries, I get this:
Freshly joined altcoin spammer
Freshly joined Twitter spammer
2 years old account creating a 2 word topic
7 years old account posting PhoenixMiner which may or may not be malware
Fresly joined generic altcoin shitposter on a tech board
Freshly joined Telegram spammer
Freshly joined Telegram spammer, in the same topic as the previous user
Fresly joined plagiarism, creating a few topics, no doubt hoping for a quick Merit
3.5 years old account posting in Italian << This one looks like a real user, I've Merited his post.
Freshly joined account posting his username and one Portuguese word

This is more or less as I expected. Real users are the rare exception.

I know you posted this a month ago, but I just noticed it and find it an interesting fact.  Any idea what's going on with that?  I'm thinking many of them are account farmers, but who knows.  I can't think of another reason why someone would register an account and wait that long to make their first post--and when that's happening with a number of accounts, it makes me a bit suspicious.

Oh, you mean like the captcha thing that the forum already has?

The 1000 first posts cover only one week. I would have expected most of those users to be new users, but it turns out many of them use an older account (which means they just made the first post since I started this topic 5 months ago).

I've reduced the update frequency from once a minute to once every 5 minutes.

Only if Recent Posts showed the post without the username.

Is it possible that the scraper was trying to get a post that had been deleted in the meantime?
I see a deleted post in the modlog.

This project got stuck on a post without userID. I don't know what happened there.
I only saw it after 3 days. It works again.

What I predicted, I have now observed in the wild:  A spambot account starts with a few posts that look plausible when viewed out of context, with text that looks copied and pasted from somewhere.


Spamfighter advice:  Never unfollow old threads.  Context is your friend.  You best know the threads in which you yourself have actively participated.

I caught this one because its second post was on an old thread that is still on my watchlist.  The post was fully grammatical, and it did not contain any links (not even hidden links).  Nobody would report that as spam, let alone as a spambot automated post.

Because I remembered the context of the thread, I immediately detected that the post made no sense:  Its content was totally irrelevant to the subject matter of the thread.  It was not related to any of the prior posts in the 13-page thread—not even as a topic-drifting side discussion!  But if you were to view the post without reading the whole thread, then you would not see it as spam.  It doesn’t look like spam.

Whereupon I examined the account’s post history, and I found that its first post was of the same nature:  More or less grammatical, no links, sensible within its four corners, and totally irrelevant to the context of the thread.  Read that post, and ask yourself if you would report it.  Then, view the context and ask again.

A list for scrutinizing each account’s first post (or even its first few posts) would not catch this.

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I can think of some easy ways for the spambot authors to attempt blending into the context.  For obvious reasons, I don’t want to explain.  Suffice it to say, an intelligent reader who has actively participated in a discussion has the best vantage point for catching any automated tricks.  —Unless the spambot authors were somehow to make their bots write good, original posts that contribute to the substance of discussions!  That would not be a bad outcome.

It's an improvement, but now the gray links can't be selected. And it still makes the posts messy.

This is currently running on loyce.club/patrol/test.html. The tooltip kinda defeats the purpose if the URL is still visible on the bottom of my browser.

I won't change this (yet). A tooltip would be perfect, but I don't think anything less than that is worth messing up the posts this much when this spam is still very rare.

Dammit! I can display href content in the tooltip but I can't find a way to display the tooltip with pointer-events disabled. Anyway, here's CSS so maybe someone has an idea (TryNinja?). I've added CSS selectors to apply only to posts.

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@TryNinja you are missing a class selector in your code. It should be

It does indeed.

At least do something like this:


Makes it readable and doesn't break the rest of the page.

Just give me a second...

Sample: https://loyce.club/patrol/test.html
This looks terrible, and I don't know enough about CSS to fix this.

I don't know about tooltips (at least not without javascript) but you can add this to CSS to display the contents of the href tag. You'll probably want to add some CSS selector in front as this applies to the entire document. Replace the square brackets with something else if you don't like them.

I thought of that after my change too.

If anyone has the CSS for this, that would be really cool

Now, it's impossible to find posts like the one mentioned by TheBeardedBaby in this topic.
For finding such hidden links, I usually hover the mouse cursor over the links and check them at bottom of my broswer without opening them.
Despite of this, I agree with disabling links.

My suggestion is to replace the links with tooltips, so that the real link is shown in a text box when you hover the mouse cursor over the disabled link. Off course, I don't know whether it's possible or not.