Hi @bockersjv,

The filters haven’t been removed, but it looks like we’ve been targeted in this new wave of spam. The filters are catching most of it, but some do slip through which we’re keeping on top of. 

If you do see a topic that has been up for a while that’s obvious spam, we’d appreciate it if you could flag it for attention 

I am also getting loads of spam coming through to my email from the Sonos Forum, see below a couple of examples.

Looks like I am going to have to stop Sonos sending me emails.

Can some further action be taken the Sonos end, this is getting irritating.

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Hi @kjgouldstone,

It looks like you might be subscribed to the Ask A Question board on here, which would send you an email every time a new topic is created. I’m not sure if you intended to do this, especially since this is one of our most active sub-forums, but you can unsubscribe by browsing to the section and clicking the button at the top right. This will stop the emails coming through for every topic created.

There should be a daily limit on the number of topics a new member can raise, which would help minimise the spam posts which are getting through.

I kinda like that idea, to be sure. 

It’s kind of unfortunate that Sonos doesn’t own this forum software, they rely on a third party called inSided, in order to maintain the code base. And, from what I can tell, inSided doesn’t seem to have the same impetus for maintaining their software (and particularly the spam bot system) as proactively as I’d like. 

And yes, I’ll admit ii is easy to sit outside and cast stones, not knowing the relationship between the two companies, nor what inSided has in their production pipeline. OTOH, this does appear to be a significant issue, from the public’s perspective. 

One thing I try to do is flag as many of these “spam” posts as I possibly can, in the hope it makes life easier for either a system, or a person, to ban the “user account”. 

Maybe InSided can restrict forum users who do not have any registered Sonos products held in their online Sonos account profile, so that they are just able to create one, or two, new threads only, per 4 hour period, or some kind of similar time-based restriction, relating to their account profile.

Accounts with one, or more, registered Sonos products can continue to operate unrestricted by such a filter… it would mean the spammer can only post up-to two new threads each 4 hour period unless they purchase a Sonos device, set it up and register it to their account profile.

There must be a simple way to eradicate these PITA spam problems once and for all.

Something as simple as every new user post needing moderator clearance until cleared for direct posting by a moderator. This has been suggested years ago.

Too many to report today. First two pages of recently active topics all spam!  Not a good image. 

I think that there are one or more “bots” helping to post the spam. Once a new user account is opened, possibly by a bot. a bot takes over and dumps the spam. For anyone who is attempting to combat the deluge, I think that a useful strategy would be to observe the member name of the poster(s) and flag only one post from each spammer account as quickly as possible, rather than attempting to flag all posts by that spammer. Once a spammer is flagged, future post attempts by that spammer will be blocked. After all of the currently active spammers are blocked, then you can return and flag the remaining posts by each spammer. Of course this strategy cannot prevent the spammer from establishing new accounts, but it will throttle more repeat posts by spammer ‘B’ while you are still flagging posts from spammer ‘A’.

They do seem to specialize in finding times the forum moderators are not around…or at least, that’s when we see them, not having visibility of all the efforts made when the moderators catch them quickly. 

There are moderators in various time zones. UT 03:00 and 11:00 plus or minus a couple hours seem to be popular timeframes for the spammers. I don’t know if this is a single spammer or a gang and it could be that spammers operate as a business and these are normal business hours or if the spammers have determined that moderator coverage is thin at particular times of day.

There are other possibilities. These spams could be posted by forgotten bots or a SONOS competitor is attempting to disrupt things. There seems to be some regularity to some of the user names. The first few characters of the names can be similar -- almost as if the spammer has a signature.

Amusing, as your own post contains a spam link in it, which I’ve flagged for a forum moderator to adjust. 

I wish that was true but reporting a spammer does not instantly block them from making further posts under the same account.

Well of course.  It would need a moderator to validate that it actually is a spammer, and not one user trying to getting another user banned without cause.

Did you read what buzz wrote? That sounded like fact, which is not the case.

Yes. I assumed by ‘flagged’, he meant by someone with admin/moderator capabilities, not simply by a user.  I could be mistake, but I took it in a more general forum moderation sense than the labels specifically used by insided.  To my knowledge, all a user does when they ‘flag’ a post is notify moderators that this is a post they should look into.  But a moderator can do as Buzz stated, block a user account, then flag/remove posts made by the user.