Spam all over the site. REPORT guys!

[User 905133]

1 hour ago, Lord Tim said:

I also suspect that a good amount of thumbs down reactions would trigger the software to hide threads too as potential spam, so that might be an option too if you guys see it.

Thanks for this. For 10-25 (or more) posts from the same account, this would save time.  Next time I see a large number from the same account, I will give it a try.

[Lord Tim]

I'd be curious to see what it does. We have no access to the filters or config of the software as mods - that's an admin thing - so I can't tell you for sure what it does, but I think I do remember seeing stuff in the queue that looks like it got an auto-flag from lots of negative reactions.

[Jeremy Oakes]

1 hour ago, John said:

It could, and we already have something like it. But this is a user forum for help and dealing with problems that may need to be addressed quickly. Through the years we have had many calls for help when a user is doing something that is time critical. How would you like to try to get help here if it takes days to be approved when first logging on? It may come to that though.

Further the people doing the spamming are hacking not just posting. They are determined to continue doing it no matter what we do.   

I’m not sure i agree 100% with you. 

J

[User 905133]

IMPORTANT: Do not assume that things that look like spam are benign. It used to be that this type of phishing activity had malicious links for malevolent purposes.  Often they pretend to be marketing for legitimate products or services in hopes of getting people to click on malevolent links. 

In the past I would hover over links to  see where they went. I would not click on them and I recommend that no one ever click on any links in "spam" posts (or e-mails).

As a courtesy, I used to report embedded links (as text) to support my reports  that they were malicious posts. For example:

Quote

This seems to be an attempt at phishing and contains links to sites that might be malicious. (HackersAreUs)

[Lord Tim]

Yeah this is a very good point ^^.

This current wave of garbage we're getting is mostly nonsense and looks AI generated, and is very obviously spam (I can only assume they're using it as some kind of SEO thing to flood forums and raise results in search engines because nobody would ever look at this stuff and go "hey you know what, I DO have a problem with my Norton! I'm going to call that number that's inside all of those emojis-  it totally looks legit! 😃") but you'll also get the sneaky ones where it looks like a proper reply to a thread and in the post is a "I can only recommend using.... [link to phishing site]"

It's not all AI though too, some of these spam accounts do a couple of "hello?" posts before they unleash, checking to see if any mods or security stuff will catch them before they set it to bomb away.

Like I said, I definitely agree there should be someone standing at the door checking IDs before it lets them into our club here, but we need to be careful what kind of bouncer that guy is or it'll impact the experience negatively. The admins are aware of the concerns, though, and are on it.  

[Lord Tim]

Ha, and like magic here they all are having a red-hot go at it. Caught 5 so far.

Bring it on, Broseph! I'm watching

[John]

1 hour ago, Jeremy Oakes said:

I’m not sure i agree 100% with you. 

J

No on is required to agree with me. I think by talking about it the staff can get an idea of how to proceed. 

[Heath Row]

What if new users are limited to 5 posts a day (whatever number) for 2 weeks (whatever period) or until they reach 100 posts (whatever number) If they register on the day they start the spamming there will only be a limited number of posts to clean up and you have them. If they are sleepers and don't start until a week, a month, a year after they sign up they will be held in check by the post reached limit and if they start they'll be held by the daily limit and you'll have them. I don't know, maybe some version of that, or maybe not 😁. I know I saw a couple of posts short of 4 pages full the other day.

I had the reason why it wouldn't be a burden on legitimate posters, but it has left me, the result of long term usage of some heavy duty pain meds and high dosage morphine patches, the memory can go to mush 🤪

Edited August 18, 2023 by heath row

[Lord Tim]

The problem with that is if the post is limited, suddenly you get 10 spammers sign up and each do 5 posts each. Meanwhile, the poor dude having issues with getting a driver conflict resolved that's asked for 5 questions to help troubleshoot the issue (not everyone is savvy enough to give the right info back unless coached) gets locked out.

Like I mentioned earlier, sometimes it's just the one spammer and if nobody is on for 45 minutes or something while everyone is off eating/sleeping/working, etc. then that can balloon to a lot. But what can also happen is within the space of 10 minutes you get 10 - 15 new signups after the initial test posts and they just go ham on every damn forum. The (I assume) AI flags that the posts were successful and they keep at it.

IP bans are hard too. I can see other forums (good example, the REAPER forum) banning VPN based addresses, which is an inconvenience if you use one as a general smart internet practice, as I do. It's not that hard to rotate out an IP or tunnel though other legit sites either.

I think the solution really is a better CAPTCHA (although they're finding bots are cracking that easier and easier now), and possibly a verification e-mail thing after signup to slow down account creation. As I said, there's robust word filters in already which catches a hell of a lot of stuff and auto-flags/hides it, but a doorman is a good idea. Invision has a few more spam fighting tools rolling out now too, so this new software update we got not long ago should help things along quite a bit in regards to those.

There's no simple answer, unfortunately. For now, we have a handle on it for most of the day. It's a bit of work for all of us, but it's doing the job until the admins can work out better solutions.

[Bass Guitar]

I'd really hate to see any weirdness to logging in and asking a question here. Not many people use these type of forums anymore and it would really be the end of this one for sure. 

Like the Steinberg forum, I bought Wave Lab and tried to join the forum. It sucked. This is a great forum and seems it's been around for a long time. Hats off to the people who keep it running and civilized. 

[Will.]

I think the best solution here would be to create a "Spam Folder" in the forum and gove access to users to only "MOVE" these posts to the folder for a mod to come in and confirm its spam and delete it.

In my Time-Zome I saw spam that was 4hrs old sitting without being removed. 

This option can be added next to the title of the post under the 3 dots tab next to the post for users to quickly move these posts to the  spam folder for a mod to confirm and delete them.  

[Glenn Stanton]

3 hours ago, Will. said:

I think the best solution here would be to create a "Spam Folder" in the forum and gove access to users to only "MOVE" these posts to the folder for a mod to come in and confirm its spam and delete it.

a simpler solution is use anti-spam filters & rules - new users need to wait 8 hours before posting or read the "rules before posting" sticky and click "like" etc would likely prevent a lot of spamming.

 

[User 905133]

Many times a new forum member will show up wanting to solve a problem. It could be a new SONAR/Cakewalk user or just a user who never joined the forum before.

From the barrages of posts I've seen over the past several months, it looks like they are coming from one source.  JMO: Personally, I would rather report 10-25 bogus posts if it means that people with legitimate urgent questions won't have to jump through hoops. I just wish there could be a one-click reporting option that makes all posts from the malicious poster disappear until a moderator can take a look at all posts from that account.

Edited August 18, 2023 by User 905133

[Will.]

1 hour ago, Glenn Stanton said:

a simpler solution is use anti-spam filters & rules - new users need to wait 8 hours before posting or read the "rules before posting" sticky and click "like" etc would likely prevent a lot of spamming.

 

They will spam the forum 8hours later "when they get approved." It has been seen doing on many sites.  You register as a legit user and once you're accepted, you run the algorithm to spam the site with your ads. 

I still think an option for users to move spams to a "Spam" folder would be a best option. The mods can then com in and do their job by confirming them and delete it. 

Edited August 18, 2023 by Will.

[John Vere]

I agree with @Bass Guitar and @User 905133 

The last thing this forum needs is any sort of blockades for new users with questions. Myself I have often joined a forum just to ask a question and the approval  is sometimes immediate or only takes an hour or so.  On the better ones I'll have my answer shortly. Otherwise I abandon that resource and keep looking. I'm a one post wonder on probably a couple dozen forums. 

This forum has almost been totally replaced with Facebook now. 1,000's of new users ask questions there instead of here. There are at least 5 different Sonar/Cakewalk Facebook pages that are at least as active or even more than the main forums here. For a few years I became active on a some of them and answered 100's of questions there.  I would also post my Tutorial s as I released them as You Tube has that as part of the publication process.  I probably gained 80% of my subscribers from there.  You want a bad answer to your question-- try Facebook. The blind leading the blind mostly. 

Facebook sucks compared to a proper structured forum like this forum which has for the most part real good advise.  I no longer support Facebook pages, I gave up.  And it immediately showed in my You Tube channel as now new subscribers have almost vanished completely.  I used to get 4 or 5 a day now it's like 1 a month. So that's the end of that project. It was fun and an interesting hobby but if that's the game you gotta play I'm out. 

I personally didn't see any spam so good job everyone.. I don't mind if  the odd spam shows up. I'm not stupid and it's pretty obvious. The current system seems just fine to me. I've used it plenty of times. 

[Terry Kelley]

Sure but what about those of us that WANT to buy a cheaper version of a shoe that Kate Middleton wears?

[Craig Anderton]

42 minutes ago, JohnnyV said:

This forum has almost been totally replaced with Facebook now. 1,000's of new users ask questions there instead of here. There are at least 5 different Sonar/Cakewalk Facebook pages that are at least as active or even more than the main forums here. For a few years I became active on a some of them and answered 100's of questions there.  I would also post my Tutorial s as I released them as You Tube has that as part of the publication process.  I probably gained 80% of my subscribers from there.  You want a bad answer to your question-- try Facebook. The blind leading the blind mostly.

As some of you may know, my "Sound, Studio, and Stage" online forum/discussion group has been in continuous operation since 1995, so I've seen a lot of changes come and go.

The "lack of activity" in a forum like this is, IMHO, a good thing. By and large the people who post here are cool, helpful, and follow decorum. The forum also has a database aspect, because you can find answers to older topics much more easily than on Facebook.

The site that hosts my forum, musicplayer.com, had a huge dropoff in participation when Facebook became the behemoth it is today. BUT the end result was the "social media" aspect of the site disappeared, while the tech part remained. Also, participation in my forum keeps creeping back up as people get burned out on social media in general.

I think something parallel is happening here. My participation in this forum is I scan for topics that have only a few replies, and see if I can help. For quite a while, it was common for threads to have no replies for quite a while. However, these days, I see fewer and fewer threads that don't already have multiple intelligent responses by the time I find them. Obviously I don't know what the stats are here, but it seems participation certainly isn't falling off. And so many of the people posting here are pure gold if you use Cakewalk (and even if you don't, there's a lot of useful advice). I think the quality of the people here is off the hook, so the quantity doesn't really matter.

[Lord Tim]

Yeah, definitely a great resource here! I consider my Cakewalk (and general computer and recording) skills as pretty solid but I'm constantly learning stuff from this forum. Even getting a different perspective can sometimes head your thinking off down a path that you wouldn't have ordinarily considered and give you a major breakthrough.

It's a bit sad about forums in general. We just shuttered my band forum after... wow, how long was it? We had a Perl based one in the 90s, switched over to a PHP one in the early 2000s and eventually ended up on vBulletin. In the mid-2000s it was actually one of the biggest metal forums in Aus and we had to have a team of mods looking after it. Fast forward to 2022 and even the tumbleweeds would rarely roll through anymore - the entire userbase had migrated to social media, which was fine because they were still very active on our socials, but I think we lost a lot of that community when forums like ours started to die out.

Community-wise here, the Coffee House downstairs is still pretty jumping though, for a forum that's mainly focussed around problem solving like this one is, and so is the Songs forum. Not sure how many people here venture down to those parts but there's some great music and some spicy takes!

But I do agree, even if you're not a regular visitor here, having this even as a resource that people can share to their socials is super valuable. The troubleshooting of problems here have often led to bug fixes and new features added, and it's a lot more permanent than a chat in the comments section of a Facebook post.

But getting back to the spam, it's being managed. We WILL have rare days where the holes in the cheese slices align and the spam slips through because every mod is unavailable for a while and the forum spam detectors get tricked, and it stays up longer than we'd like, but I'm typically seeing times between 10 to 25 minutes at worst for any spam floods, usually even much less if one of us is actively here keeping an eye on things. It's not ideal but the system is more or less working at the moment until we can work out other sensible options that don't inconvenience anyone or potentially bring in other problems.

[Will.]

They are back! 😩

[Canopus]

Lord Tim, who's been the early morning janitor, hasn’t been logged on for almost two weeks. I hope he’s okay.