Aksimet Fails to Stop Spam Attack

Support
1

Hi everyone - on the IDX Community, we have the Akismet plugin enabled, but it is failing to stop a spam attack:

"The image is a screenshot of a phone with a dark theme, displaying three topics related to transaction refund money." (Captioned by AI)
"The image is a screenshot of a phone with a dark theme, displaying three topics related to transaction refund money." (Captioned by AI)1456Ă—658 33.3 KB

I have manually deleted (and flagged/blocked) over 1000 posts over the past few hours. The posts do seem to be getting flagged:

The image displays a mobile device screen with a list of system reviewable items. (Captioned by AI)
The image displays a mobile device screen with a list of system reviewable items. (Captioned by AI)802Ă—1518 139 KB

What am I doing wrong? I have checked my settings (this is part of a Discourse Hosted setup), and the plugin is enabeld.

(FWIW, this same attack on my personal forums was successfully blocked by Akismet)

Thanks,
Kirupa

1 Like
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Did you change the default trust level site setting or change any of the tl1 requires site settings?

That way users can be excluded from Akismet, because by default the skip akismet groups includes all users with trust level 1 and above.

5 Likes
3

I didn’t change the default settings there, but I just changed it to remove tl1 and adding our moderator/admin team instead:

The image displays a screenshot of a computer program interface, likely a tool for generating text captions for images. (Captioned by AI)
The image displays a screenshot of a computer program interface, likely a tool for generating text captions for images. (Captioned by AI)1726Ă—410 36.8 KB

When I looked at the trust level of the spammers, they are all in **tl0**.:

The image displays a computer interface with a dark theme, showing a settings menu with various options like Trust Level, Suspended, Silenced, and Automatic, with options to select and customize. (Captioned by AI)
The image displays a computer interface with a dark theme, showing a settings menu with various options like Trust Level, Suspended, Silenced, and Automatic, with options to select and customize. (Captioned by AI)1332Ă—832 29.4 KB

My guess would be that they would all be flagged by akismet anyway even though the default settings were in **tl1**.

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So, it’s skipping posts from tl0, tl1,2,3,4, in this case

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Are you sure? The description says “Don’t submit posts to Akismet if the user is in any of these groups” Why should tl0 users be skipped if that group isn’t added to the setting?

2 Likes
6

That is my understanding as well. The groups that are listed will be omitted from being flagged by Akismet.

To change this question a bit, Akismet does flag some posts as spam:

An image of a computer screen displaying a social media profile with a post. (Captioned by AI)
An image of a computer screen displaying a social media profile with a post. (Captioned by AI)2592Ă—1404 257 KB

Is there a way to tell Discourse to hide these posts until a moderator has reviewed them? Today, the post is flagged BUT it also appears for everyone.

Thanks,
Kirupa

7

There are a few other helpful tips at Tips for Preventing Spam (including the hiding of posts threshold) which might be useful.

2 Likes
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@HAWK - thanks. We implemented a lot of those items, and that is now catching most of the spam.

Hopefully last question. There are over 400 items flagged for review from the last few hours. Is there a fast way to bulk delete/remove all of these?

This is a screenshot of a computer interface, displaying an email or message conversation with a subject line "Salman Khan customer care helpline number." (Captioned by AI)
This is a screenshot of a computer interface, displaying an email or message conversation with a subject line "Salman Khan customer care helpline number." (Captioned by AI)1920Ă—1185 125 KB