[wp-forums] Spam!

[esmi at quirm dot net]

We hit a new spam list record this morning (10:00 GMT). Over 2,000 in 
the list. Looks like no one had cleared it for about 10 hours.

Fortunately, my other half (Rich/elfin - also a mod) heard my cries of 
anguish and joined in the clearout. About 15 minutes later, a third 
person joined - so thank you - whoever you were. :-)

All told it took about 45 minutes for 3 of us to clear the queue. Spam 
is currently coming in at a rate of about 1 every 5-6 seconds, so can I 
ask all mods to please monitor the queue as often as possible.

Right now, clearing the queue (especially a large one) takes a fair 
amount of time because there's no way to distinguish between spammers 
and "manual" bozos. Rich has a plugin for 1.x bbPress that might help. 
It lists those flagged by Akismet as spam (at the time of posting) 
separately from true bozos (there's a Bozo option added to the top 
dropdown). But it would need testing on WPORG. If it worked, it should 
drastically reduce the time spent on filtering the queue by eye.

Are we interested (please say 'yes)?

Finally, can I please ask all mods to make an extra effort to mark 
spammers as bozos. Two spam accounts started posting at about 5:00 GMT 
and were, thankfully, caught by Akismet for about 5 hours. Then they 
changed their posting style. Approx 30 got through onto the forums 
(mainly in Alpha/Beta) before I caught them. If they'd been marked as 
bozos earlier, that would not have happened. So manual flagging *is* 
important.

Mel
-- 
http://quirm.net
http://blackwidows.co.uk