Befuddled by Fake Diploma (and similar) Spam

[Cadence]

I'm kind of surprised that there isn't any way to auto-deal with the nightly fake diploma spam adds in Chinese.

Does Xenforo have a free spam phrase blocker option? If so, would blocking the Chinese characters for WeChat, University, academic, degree, and certificate completely stop it?

(If it's not free, how expensive is it? Or are there other ads that creep through too?)

 

[Guest 7034872]

I'm kind of surprised that there isn't any way to auto-deal with the nightly fake diploma spam adds in Chinese.

Does Xenforo have a free spam phrase blocker option? If so, would blocking the Chinese characters for WeChat, University, academic, degree, and certificate completely stop it?

(If it's not free, how expensive is it? Or are there other ads that creep through too?)

There are forum spam-blocking add-ons and programs, certainly, and some very good ones are free. I imagine this site uses some. It seems to be a constant worldwide arms race between spammers and forum owners, though: new, improved filters or detection methods get popular, leading to new, sneakier work-arounds.

EDIT: Here's one I used to use when on the mod crew of another forum: Stop Forum Spam

 

[Umbran]

I'm kind of surprised that there isn't any way to auto-deal with the nightly fake diploma spam adds in Chinese.

Does Xenforo have a free spam phrase blocker option?

Maintaining our own curated list would quickly be a losing battle. As soon as they use a variant of the things we block, they'd get through again. These days, proper spam blocking is a service, maintained by folks who do it full time, rather than by us manually. And there's a war between the spammers and the blockers. And occasionally, some slip through.

As we manually block spam, that information gets fed back to the services, and they eventually catch up.

 

[Cadence]

Maintaining our own curated list would quickly be a losing battle. As soon as they use a variant of the things we block, they'd get through again. These days, proper spam blocking is a service, maintained by folks who do it full time, rather than by us manually. And there's a war between the spammers and the blockers. And occasionally, some slip through.

As we manually block spam, that information gets fed back to the services, and they eventually catch up.

That makes sense. The college/university degree/credential fake documents spam seems like its been a recurrent theme for a long time, and would almost necessarily have some words they'd need to use.

But I will certainly believe it isn't as trivial to deal with as it might seem at first blush! Thanks for addressing my curiosity