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Werner_E25-Diamond I
25-Diamond I
November 27, 2020
Question

Spam Flood in the community

  • November 27, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 6328 views

I notice that the last couple of weeks the Mathcad section of this forum is spammed quite a lot. The postings are from accounts created just to make one single post and on a first quick glance seem to be a valid answer. Sometimes they also contain a more or less hidden link - apparently to entice other users to visit the linked pages.

Is this problem already known to PTC? It should, as I used the "Notify Moderator" option a lot on some of those posts, asking for the postings to be deleted (with little success).

Are others experiencing similar annoying issues in other parts of this forum?

@Jaime_Lee  Is PTC already taking measures to cope with the problem? In any case, I couldn't find anything about it in the community announcements so far.

Here are a few links to some of the posts I am talking about

https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad/MathCAD-Trial/m-p/700477/highlight/true#M193106

https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad/hi/m-p/700492/highlight/true#M193107

https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad/PTC-Mathcad-Prime-6-0-Student-Edition-%C3%A2-One-Year-Term-License/m-p/700544/highlight/true#M193111

https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad/Quel-est-le-prix-pour-mathacad-15/m-p/700552/highlight/true#M193112

https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad/Login/m-p/700117/highlight/true#M193079

EDIT:

https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad/Unknown-error-quot-failed-quot-of-mode-Union/m-p/700641/highlight/true#M193134

 

1 reply

J
Jaime_LeeCommunity Manager
Community Manager
November 27, 2020

Hi, @Werner_E   My latest community announcement actually just got spammed as well and I asked one of our Technical Support Managers to take a look to see where they were coming from. 

 

Yes, "Notify Moderator" is the right course of action.  Thank you for bringing these specific posts to my attention.  Hopefully, we can use these to further trace why this is happening. 

W
Werner_E25-Diamond IAuthor
25-Diamond I
December 8, 2020

I also notice that many of those post at first come without any links embedded but after a while a link is added.


Yes, "Notify Moderator" is the right course of action.

Yes that may be. But it gets boring and reaction time of a few days is rather long. Furthermore this sure can't be the ultimate, permanent "solution".
I would have assumed that a system like Khoros had ways of preventing common undesirable behavior like this more efficiently.

 

BTW, the last one I found
https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad/Tree-ovals-mean-gmean-amp-hmean/m-p/701998/highlight/true#M193319

The body is copied from publicly accessible websites and seems to be triggered by some keywords in the subject of the thread. That way on first glance it may appear to be a legitimate answer. When I noticed it first, the link at the end wasn't there - it seems to have been added later. Maybe a way to trick moderation.

J
Jaime_LeeCommunity Manager
Community Manager
December 9, 2020

Notify Moderator for SPAM requests should not take days to be resolved.  If  "notify moderator" is taking days to resolved (unless over a weekend) please let myself or @Leigh know.  This is not expected behavior.

 

We just implemented an added layer of security to catch "obvious" spam attacks.

 

We will review this thread in our community team meeting this week.

 

 

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