All my replies are being filtered as spam?!?

it is sooooooo frustrating!

Maybe when Dean only sees like 6 replies to his weekly wisdom instead of the usual 60 or so, something will click...?

Team is working on it as we speak!!!!

BTW, for those of you that can't read the captchas, hit the refresh button in it (the two arrowed circle) until you're able to make sense of it.

I'll try that... I already pulled out my prescription glasses, and still get deleted

hopefully they'll get it fixed soon... as DG says, they're working on it... Thanks Dean!

Thank you for posting this thread, Mark. At least now I can see that I can post again! (and my IP address is no longer flagged!)

Cris

The captchas should be enabled on new user account creation and blogs. We want to get the spammers at the door, not after they've made it onto the website.

Sorry about that.... Spammers are really clever and we will resolve that. But we will NEVER, EVER do anything to restrict out awesome DG family from posting;-)) So sorry again for the short hiccup but all should be back up with no restrictions..

We will get those smatters another way;-)))

Dean

Hope so, Yes, glad to see Dean is on this too. Thanks Mark for telling how to refresh on the captcha's too.

still having problem with the captcha's. ARggghh hate the captcha's!!

try refreshing them as Mark suggested... still a pain, but at least you get multiple tries

Thank you Dean for getting the problem fixed, and getting rid of spammers!!!

In regards to your specific statement... They are enabled at account creation. That will not stop spam bots since the bots can then post unlimited spam comments/topics once the account has been created (manually or a pay-per-captcha breaking service).

We remove the captcha for commenting/posts once a user becomes a trusted poster (accumulates a certain number of points). However, we have temporarily put it back on for all accounts as there are still some spam accounts that have not been deleted that have made it to that status and this weekend we do not have moderation team reviewing in real time. So until the moderation team gets rid of the last remaining spam accounts on Monday there will be captchas in place for posting comments to prevent thousands of spams from coming through.

As far as the general question about being flagged as spam asked by others... we are training a new spam filter so some posts may be flagged as spam until it better learns what is and isn't spam. I have turned back the restrictiveness of the filters since there have been some falsely flagged spam, but just know that this still may happen once in a while over the next couple days while it is learning. Unless you're told the system it rejected your post all together it will go into a review queue where we will approve it shortly.

If you add links to your posts your post has a much higher chance of being flagged as spam since spam almost always contains links. If you are posting a link ensure there is content in your post also or it may look like spam to the system.

For a long time we have had very liberal spam settings as far as not requiring captchas challenges and restrictive spam settings so no real users would be inconvenienced on the site. However, this has led to more spam getting through than is acceptable and becoming an inconvience to real users that want to browse the site without seeing spam. So while we clamp down on the spam we hope you all will be patient over the next couple days while we dial in our settings in the event any of your content is inappropriately flagged as spam.

Thanks,
DGadmin

I am able to post with the captcha going back to the old one if this post shows up. The old captcha is easier to read.

Is there a way to have the captcha and spam filter turned off for people who have over say 50 or 100 posts here already? Thanks dgadmin

Dean, I knew you'd be all over this as soon as you knew! Thanks!

Yes, please PM that list to both of us and we will remove them.

After we have found and removed the remaining spammers we can remove the captcha for trusted posters. The reason why we cannot do that until then is that the spam accounts have lots of posts/points from their spamming so they wouldn't be presented a captcha either and the flood of the spam would start again.

In a couple days we'll have weeded out the spammers and trained the new filter so we will be spam free for the most part without any extra hurdles for existing members.

New members may continue to need to enter captchas until they reach the threshold where the system determines they are legit and can bypass that. It will depend on how well the filters are working to automatically detect the spam once trained.

Hi DG Admin, I tried PMing you but the system said you don't accept PMs, I PMed DGadmin2, feel free to go into my PM account, and see the list, or you can briefly enable your PM and disable it right away as soon as you get my PM with the list - We can get these remaining spammers off of the face of this website tonight!

I'll keep on this thread, or PM me so I can just hit reply back with the exact spots where I saw them!

Thanks, sorry I forgot my PM was off. DGadmin2 (Jeremy) will be handling them tomorrow so that's good.

The email subject that I sent to you is:

List of 10 spammer accounts that I found (with their ads too x about 4 -

in case it gets filtered as junk or spam (because it has the direct links to these spammers accounts.

The PM I sent to DGadmin2 only had their names (without the hyperlinks) because I'm afraid my PM would be considered spam as it has 10 links!

Hope that helps!

Cris

If anyone else also has any account names of spammers still on this site they can PM them to dgadmin2 for removal.

Once our moderation team is on duty to handle real time approval of the posts we will start training the filter again. To train the filter you need to tell it which posts are real posts since it starts out knowing very little. As such, your posts may be flagged as spam when they aren't, and we know this and will mark them in the system as legit posts immediately. This shouldn't affect many posts and shouldn't last for more than a couple of days. After that we can let filters take over and do most of the heavy lifting of keeping the spam off of the site.

I wish this wasn't necessary, but we've been having thousands of spam posts and hundreds of different spammers trying to flood this site daily and with the old system even catching 90% of it still means a lot of spam gets through, so we need to catch closer to 100% and that means some false positives, especially during the training period.

Thanks,
DGadmin

Thanks DGAdmin! I appreciate it! The email has been sent and so you and Jeremy both have the list.

I'm calling it a night!

God bless this website! Please keep the evil spammers OUT! Amen!

Cris

Thanks for the explanation of what's going on. It's nice not to be left in the dark and wondering if anything is being done.
Keep up the great work!

Perhaps things are almost back to normal without the spam.