Handling Spam Reports

Let's get to know your friendly spam reports system. (This tutorial assumes that you have the Support Privileges siteadmin:spamreports and sysban:talk_ip_test. If you do not have these, you will not be able to access the pages mentioned in this tutorial. Any user is welcome to request membership to the Anti-Spam team.)

The basics!

Load the Spam Reports page. In another tab or window, load the Sysban page.

From the Spam Reports page, pick the Top 10 by IP Address report.

The Top 10 by IP Address report gives the number of spam reports about this IP address, the IP address, and the date and time of the most recent report linked to a copy of the most recent comment reported as spam for this IP address.

Open the link for any spam report. Review the information in the spam report. Spam is often painfully obvious.

If, in your opinion, the comment in question is spam, move to the Sysban page.

On the Sysban page, pick 'talk_ip_test' and click Add New. The Sysban Management page loads. In the Value field, enter the IP address from the spam report. Pick a Duration of Forever. Enter a Note that indicates that the IP address is that of a spammer. Creativity in spammer sysban notes is encouraged. Click the Add button. You will most likely get the message "Ban successfully added." unless someone has beat you to them, in which case you will get "Ban not valid: This is already banned". (Click the Return to Sysban Page button to do it all over again.)

Move back to the Spam Reports page. Click the 'Close All' button. If for any reason you have made a mistake, a 'Go Back' link is available. Otherwise, use the 'Front Page' link to return to the Spam Reports page, or otherwise return to the Top 10 by IP Address page to do another.

If the spam report is not spam, close the report without sysbanning the IP address.

While membership on the Anti-Spam team does not require a Non-Disclosure Agreement, use discretion with the information contained in spam reports. Do not share any potentially sensitive information such as telephone numbers, addresses, et cetera, that may be found in them.

The sysban:talk_ip_test command does not completely block the IP address from accessing Dreamwidth. It forces all people and bots connecting to Dreamwidth from this IP address to correctly fill out a CAPTCHA. Ideally, bots will then fail this test, while humans will succeed, so you need not fear accidentally blocking a user, only annoying them.