I have a Discourse installation and am super happy with it. Recently spammers have found ways to workaround the built in spam-protection. The problem is, they post images in their posts and then immediately embed these images in spam e-mails they send to thousands of people. Even if I delete the pos…

Hmmm. That is a tricky one. :thinking: I think if you edit the post to remove the image so it’s not included in the latest version of a post (deleted or otherwise), and also set clean orphan uploads grace period hours to the minimum of 1 hour that may speed up the removal. It’s not an ideal soluti…

I have already set it to one hour, but they are really quick to send out their spam e-mails… Do you know whether using S3 instead of my own server for uploads would resolve the issue? Is there maybe some way to only allow viewing of uploaded images to logged in users?

[image] Andreas: Do you know whether using S3 instead of my own server for uploads would resolve the issue? Is there maybe some way to only allow viewing of uploaded images to logged in users? There is the Secure Uploads feature that may be of some use: https://meta.discourse.org/t/secure-up…

Maybe I should post this as a feature request then. Basically I believe I would need two things ability to immediately remove images if a user is deleted (including profile pic) ability to immediately remove or secure images if a user is flagged for review

Use this, you can easily and quickly permanently delete images [image] Enable setting to allow admins to permanently delete data Self-Hosting bookmark This is a guide on how to enable the setting for administrators to permanently delete data on a Discourse inst…

Thanks, I’ll try that. Are you sure it will also permanently delete images?

I think it deletes the posts and the uploads are taken care of in a similar way to the method above using clean orphan uploads grace period hours. There’s also an inbuilt delay of 5 minutes between soft deleting and permanently deleting by the same admin (though a second admin would not face the …

Yes. And as the other guy above said. Gotta wait 5 mins. Just use another admin account to do it instantly. It’ll permanently delete the image.

I think something’s wrong with your NGINX configuration. When I try to open an image from your forum in a new tab, it loads just fine even though it shouldn’t since I haven’t passed any referer :thinking: If you get it to work, it will solve most of your spam issues as they won’t be able to hotlink…

Spammers using uploaded images in spam e-mails. Any advice how to resolve?

Support

Genisis June 14, 2024, 10:38am 7

Use this, you can easily and quickly permanently delete images

Topic		Replies	Views
Secure Uploads Announcements secure-uploads	43	17629	July 24, 2025
How to Delete Uploaded Files? Support	28	8197	February 18, 2025
What’s the suggested method to use secure images? Support uploads	6	603	June 15, 2023
Missing images at Meta.discourse.org Site feedback	57	2630	June 20, 2026
Disallow anonymous users from viewing image & file URLs Feature	33	4936	April 14, 2025

Spammers using uploaded images in spam e-mails. Any advice how to resolve?

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