Recent SPAM outbreak

Lovely how Apple engineers can find time to remind devs to file bugs while blissfully ignoring the incessant spam issues here. Nero would have been so very proud.

No wonder they've moved to SO instead...

This just occurred to me: so after we all jump on a spammer user and get him or her removed, is the Apple ID banned or is it just the username? If just the username is deleted, wouldn't the person be able to log back into the forums, pick a new screen name, and keep right on posting those poorly written advertisements? I get the feeling that this is only one person who is doing this. A group of people would probably provide a greater effort. (I mean, wouldn't he know that English isn't like, "Frigidaire Frigidaire Frigidaire Frigidaire…" I would be afraid to have him or her work on my dishwasher!)

Persons using bots. A script creates new apple ids in batches, then posts in batches. Those ids are throwaways, and there is no point in tracking them. Blocking the IP is pointless as the script runs/generates spoofed info from an endless supply of hijacked computers. Whack-a-mole at it's finest.

What's strange is they all immediately show between 10 & 20 views...and there doesn't seem to be any purpose, other than to dig in and continue or just probe beyond what we see.

But their regularity and foothold here makes it look like they might be masking some sort of communication? I see some patterns, but the Holiday Inn Maadi/Cairo is shut down for renovation, so it's not like they're trying to market it... I do see some dates too.

As HyperNS said above. they need to go back to only allowing registered devs, just like in the past.

Apple hasn't shown any interest in dealing with it (and how bad the forum package is in general), however, which may explain why Apple engrs. have moved to SO, I guess.

Heck it might even turn out to be Jive Software doing it to make Apple cough up the money for the next tier support package...

"The White House will attempt to enlist Silicon Valley’s major technology firms in its efforts to combat terrorism on Friday when a delegation of the most senior intelligence officials fly to California to meet with executives from companies including Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, YouTube and others."

Let's hope the spam here comes up during those meetings...

Haven't seen any for several weeks now… (Knocking on wood, just to be safe 😝 )

I guess either they've figured out how to block the spam or the spammers gave up because nobody hear speaks Arabic and wants their refrigerators fixed!

Well, the Arabic spam is gone, but now there's someone advertising, well, something from Odisha, India. Sigh.

Did you miss the clown selling c'cards and paypal accounts?

Still 1,000,000 times in agreement with you on this. These forums are bad enough

with the often inane questions of those who couldn't be bothered to even read a

single line of documentation. They are virtually useless with all of the spam.

I think it's rather pointless logging on here any longer. Spammers continue to be free to spam their hearts out, too many of the 'questions' are nothing more than middle school homework assignments and endlessly repeated complaints about a beta, all while Apple's engineers have moved on to other forums.

There is no evidence Apple cares about making any changes, so it seems time for the rest of us to take the hint.

Going on 11 months now...the new normal.

Days since last outbreak: 0

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Fun forum tip #42 - search on: outbreak

Let's remember to thank JIVE Software, Portland Oregon USA, for their totally porous forum package that does nothing to prohibit a constant flow of driveby spam.

Interesting....last tonight's/this morning's routine spam fest came off a bit different - new posts appear only for a short time and then go away/are hidden (as opposed hanging around until the lights come on in the office).

Fingers crossed there is now an automated process in place that will work to squelch the noise and we'll see less from now on.

Some are hanging around going on 15 ~ 20 minutes, at least, which makes me think it's still being dealt with manually.

-=-

It's bad enough when it's all in new threads, relatively easily identified. If they ever figure out how to post spam replies to real threads, then we can really kiss these forums goodbye. At least I will.

They probably opened up the forums to the "public"...to welcome in people who are not part of the dev program...to hopefully get them interested in becoming part of the dev program. But come on. There are plenty of third party sites and youtube channels marketing iOS development. Can we get spam free forums? Random spam posts aren't going to convince anyone to join the dev program anyway.

These forums reallly only have a few active folks anyway. We lost a bunch of features with this forum change...

-Can't attach images.

-Every time I make a post that has a link, I have to wait for a mod to approve my post.

-And now we have endless spam.

We try to use these forums to help us work. Jeez.

Far as how 3rd party devs are treated...every platform release we are expected to support more hardware, but usually it comes without any (or very little) opportunity to make additional revenue. tvOS apps get bundled with your iOS apps. WatchKit apps get bundled with your iOS apps... the Mac App Store doesn't support paid upgrades, even though paid upgrades are standard for desktop apps and customers generally understand this.

They can't even keep the lousy iAd server up so we can make a few bucks off our free iOS apps because a 30% cut isn't enough of a share for them...

But at least they laid out all that money to buy these forums for us....I don't know how much that software company (JIVE is it?) is to blame for the spam...maybe they are...I would imagine leaving the forums open to non-paid develoeprs has a lot to do with it. A paid developer isn't going to spam here.

Can we switch to MyBB or something? It has been awhile since I saw anyone with an Apple badge post here. They really moved to third party forums? Are they going to shut the forums down like they did iAd Network?

Yeah, that will be a real headache. Even the WordPress ecosystem has it better than this: ever heard of Akismet?

wordpress.org / plugins / akismet