Too Much Spam, Put The Foot Down

On This site ‘Kongregate’ there seems to be a lot of spam.
Who agrees Harder and Longer punishments should be applied for such a crime?
There is also a problem of banned victims creating another or multiple accounts used for the exact same thing spamming, Chat and Forums.
I really hate spam and most people do, apart from the people who apply it.

Discuss on a way to stop spammers creating multiple accounts. Also Maybe Ip Locking.

This will probably not affect spam but it is always good to Discuss.

Start Discussing Now! Please discuss!

This is the serious discussion forum. Just voting yes or no is not discussion, and indeed a thread of just "yes"es or "no"es would end up looking a lot like spam.

In any case, I would vote no because your plan is fundamentally flawed. I could get ten e-mail addresses in half an hour, more if I put a bit of effort into automating the process – and that’s actual email addresses; Kongregate may or may not allow one of the many open single-use e-mail addresses like mailinator.com. Limiting the maximum number of accounts per e-mail address will do nothing w.r.t spam.

Thankyou For spotting that out Einar. How about we discuss the problem.
While Voting =D

a_0z, you said this:
Vote with “Yes” or “No” to whether a Maximum number of accounts can be created with a single Email account. I favour a number from 2 -3 Also Maybe IP LOCKING.

That’s it! Ip locking! i vote……not sure

Any community website is going to have idiots. It’s probably a rule of the internet (don’t know which number). Honestly, I find that Kongregate is very good about spam. The community is relatively mature and the moderators/administrators do a pretty decent job of cleaning out the few people who are really causing problems.

It’s very easy to create a new email address. I don’t think limiting the number of accounts that you can link to an email address is really going to make that much of a difference. Also, and I think arcaneCoder would disagree with me here (though I can’t remember why – would love to hear a counter reponse), I’m against IP blocking. (For ampkit and others: an IP address is your address on the internet and Kong could block it from logging onto the website) It’s a bit too easy to get around IP blocks to be all that effective, but more importantly, an IP block can end up blocking out people that you don’t want to block. This would happen to anyone who is behind an external router on some sort of NATed network. The result is you would end up blocking an entire family, or in the most extreme cases, and entire university, from accessing the website.

Admittedly though, if IP blocks are only used in the most extreme cases, Kongregate could do some research and make sure their IP block wouldn’t hurt other people. Maybe that’s what arcane’s argument for IP blocks is (I remember talking with him about this at an earlier date). Honestly though, I don’t think we’ve really had even a single case of someone actually needing an IP block yet. I’m really rather impressed with Kongregate on the whole as a community.

IP blocks are worthless unless you’re willing to block all of Tor and every single other public proxy out there. Without that extreme measure, it’d only stop the stupid trolls.

“The most extreme cases” already know about these things, so even then it would not be worthwhile; they’d just get a proxy.

Yeah, that’s what I meant by “easy to get around”. :-/

And blocking public proxies would likely generate some bad press for Kongregate, though I don’t know if it’d generate enough bad press to be a problem.

I would however argue that most trolls are stupid trolls, or young ones who wouldn’t know so much about computers. But in general I agree, IP blocks just aren’t a good solution.

Also, they do already IP block people who get banned from making new accounts during the duration of the ban (I chatted with Matt for a while, and we got on the subject).

Besides proxies, IP blocking would disable everyone from getting on using that IP.

that’s exactly why Proxies and IP blocking aren’t always good first steps. I think our policy is pretty good. Frankly, this is the best serious discussion forum I’ve ever been on, with the possible exception of Gamegrene. So, I have no issues with current policy, even though I don’t know what it is, I know that it’s working well enough without my intervention or knowledge. Personally, I’ll settle for very effective subtlety over heavy-handed authority any day of the week.

Mellowly yours,
Theo

Even if they limit it to 2 or 3 people still have MANY email accounts and can easily make more.

Yes but that is when ip blocking comes in.

And that is when this comes in.

[censored by matt lol]

link removed to discourage the behavior it aids :D

Oh it’s good I didn’t see that rubbish.

Well to say the least there’s plenty of things that can change your ip.

Yes but then your ip is difficult to attach to things Ex- Games. So it is not a good idea to change your Ip address.

They simply change it to another ip.

For example i used one once and i got a ip from hawaii. (Although that was a LONG time ago, to all the kong mods who were considering banning me then.)

Er, any internet application built with the assumption that you will use the same ip address more than once should be rethought. Many people have dynamic IP addresses, or laptops they use in open wifi areas, or any number of things. Authentication based on IP address is like authenticating someone based on what shirt they’re wearing, assuming there’s only 2^32-ish unique shirts in the world.

Yes I see.. Hmm.. Well they could be notified.

To much work. The systems fine as it is.

I think that a nice idea would be Flash cookies. If we could get several different files hidden around the computer, it would make a very nice blocker (anyone who logs into ___ will be banned by those Flash files, with an email address for Kongregate instead of the site).

i agree now im not saying i want to be banned here because i have fully changed my attitude around and i am good user now but. back when i was an idiot i sen three diffrent users 100 shouts calling them bad things and one of the users was arcane coder i made 20 alts spammed the forums chat ect this was all in one day and all i got was a like 3 day ban on each account btw sorry bout all that

Extreme I don’t think it would be a good idea to put Flash cookies on someones computer with out THEIR permission It could interfere with something on their computer and then maybe erase it.

i agree now im not saying i want to be banned here because i have fully changed my attitude around and i am good user now but. back when i was an idiot i sen three diffrent users 100 shouts calling them bad things and one of the users was arcane coder i made 20 alts spammed the forums chat ect this was all in one day and all i got was a like 3 day ban on each account btw sorry bout all that

How interesting… a reformed troll. Now that you’re civilized, theres a question that I’d really like to ask. What is the point in trolling?