Blocking obfuscated posts?

[wiggins09]

Some groups are being flooded with obfuscated posts.
Might not be so bad if they simply used a unique group (altho someone is gonna have to pay for all this server-side content storage...) but some think its a great idea to foul up groups where plain-text posts are the norm with 0000s of "useless" posts.


Obviously manually blocking the posters is both impractical for blacklist length & never-ending processing.
I wondered about a regex but not sure I can identify enough that separates this garbage from a 'genuine' post title...

Anyone have a solution/idea about this?

[Quade]

I use:

"[0-9a-z]{24}"

Which means "match any continuous string of characters which contain the numbers 0-9 and the characters a to z."

Every now and then I'll use apply that and shift-delete the headers to remove them permenantly. You could also add that to the global subject reject filter.

It's worth checking the groups to see if any posts in a particular group are any good anymore. I have a topic with maybe 10 groups in it. Some of the groups have died off and only see this kind of traffic. It makes sense to remove the groups that are no longer productive.

[wiggins09]

Thanks Quade.
I had wondered if that kind of general matching would also eliminate any/all words & 'legit' posts titles. (Hadn't gotten round to actually testing it tho!).

I will give it a shot

[Quade]

I've never seen it catch anything I was interested in. Some German posts use really long words that might be 24 characters long but typically in English you never get words that long.

Remember it's a continuous string of characters with no spaces or formatting.