Probably because of all the spam bots repeatedly attacking the forum over the last week or so.

 Yeah.  Those have been a pain.  To me it seems logical for monitors to look at a membership status and easily determine the post is not a bot.  If you look at the “bot” members during one of those “hijack” events they all have no history in this community.

Unfortunately, Gainsight doesn’t seem to have the capability to check user signup date in order to filter spam.  Yet another way this crappy forum software falls short. 

The forum software is (accurate word omitted to pass the filters) and the moderators have had to set some very primitive filters and do a lot of manual checking.

It is less than optimal for real posters but when the forum software is allowing 10 plus pages of spam posts to each real post there is no alternative.

Well other than switching to almost any other forum software and dumping this trainwreck.

I imagine posts that include links are particularly ‘suspect’, to the ‘bot’. 

What a joke this is when actual user posts are being sent to a moderator for approval whilst spam posts slip right through.

I hadn’t noticed any spam posts since they’d tightened the ‘bot?

They started about an hour ago. The spammers know it’s the weekend and won’t be cleaned up until Monday. 

Every spam post in the last hour has a link and gibberish for a title.  The Gainsite “filter” is a joke.

Yep, not worth trying to find real posts at this point, first two recent-posts pages only had two real posts.

Worse looked like most of the spam had live links.

Anybody have any clue why Sonos is so set on riding this trainwreck forum package over the cliff?

Looks like the filter was disabled for the weekend! 

During last week’s spam attack my account was banned as I made the mistake of posting in the middle of the spam-fest. Was re-instated after I created a temp account and spoke to the mods.

What’s also weird is that some of my posts go through moderation, which is weird given my history here, and yet brand-new account posts clearly do not go through any.

I sure haven’t figured out the ‘magic’ of the spam filter. I’ve been staying away from the forum while moderators aren’t on duty.  

This spam is rather tedious. What I have noticed, the Sonos community must have a high ranking in Google, as the community pages are crawled and searchable with 24 hours, which is good if you want to search for Sonos related information.

Unfortunately it also makes it a good target for the AI spammers, as they hope the spam will be indexed and searchable by Google, due to Google’s current high ranking of Sonos community.

I expect the content that is being posted recently will probably lower the ranking of Sonos community on Google search.

I’ve been cautious in posting too, not doing any live links until this is sorted.

I wonder why the registration for the Sonos community does not have any form of CAPTCHA or similar?

I did a search on the phone number in recent spam post.

Here is example of how quick the spam community pages are indexed by Google, and how they show up in google.

My post above being reviewed by moderators? Surely they only need to review the 1st post of a new account? Tedious.

Hey all,
Let me jump in and see if I can add some clarity around this.

As we all have noticed over the last week the community has been the target of a lot of spam, this caused us to look at things we haven’t looked at in a long long time.

First we updated our keyword blocker list, which causes some posts to have to be approved by our moderators first before being posted. This isn’t perfect, and we’d rather not have this in place at all, but it does help with making sure most of the spam doesn’t hit our community.

Then we also made sure there are restrictions in place that will prevent new accounts of creating a certain amount of new topics each day, again something we’d rather not utilize but it does help mitigate the spam.

And finally, of course, we are also in contact with our platform provider (Gainsight) who are working together with us on how to make sure to keep the community public and easily accessible to all our users, without doing too many concessions.

We are exploring all our available tools to make sure the changes we make only hit the bots, something that’s not perfect and will require us to fine-tune things the coming days/weeks

Or you could fire your platform provider and go with a more experienced and polished forum software that has functionality like a proper search and actual working Spam filters. 

Meanwhile, a blast from the past, when AI forum spam wasn’t a thing. Anyone remember “Digital Experts” and forums.sonos.com? 

https://web.archive.org/web/20051213011323/http://forums.sonos.com/

How times have changed, with more essential ‘polish’ required these days

I just registered a new account using a dummy email address, I wonder if I can post this?

There was no CAPTCHA validation on the registration form, and no email validation link was clicked, so extremely easy for the spammers to take advantage.

craigski

And that forum software from almost two decades ago has far more advanced features than Gainsight does today (and doesn’t appear to be getting in the future). 

The post filter is still ridiculous. Trying to have a conversation and your post gets sent to a mod for approval, whilst absolute nonsense from newly created accounts gets posted immediately.

Keyword blocker list is still a farce hitting actual users whilst spam continues to appear daily.