And rely on perl/sed/grep?

Yuck! :P

Don't laugh, I've seen things like this in online shop systems in the 90's and early 00's.

I believe you, i recall a fan-based story archive or two doing that...

However once Apache/PHP/MySQL become a workable free combo those were pretty much pointless... Plus the CGI (Common Gateway Interface) was confusing and never made sense, even while i was on geocities at the time. Most html was huge and unorderly and although you could do wonders with perl, it really wasn't the best system to rely on.

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/grabbing_my_ban_hammer_link_me_the_spam/post186

Yellow alert?

There's a blue text explanation in another thread somewhere (I couldn't find it after looking around for a few minutes) explaining why this doesn't work. A summary of the answer, as I recall it, is that this policy would help drive off potential customers ("I have to buy something before I can ask questions about anything? Screw that.").

In a little while, I'm going to take a longer look at this and see if I can find holes, then I'll get back to you. Who knows? Maybe it might help GoG implement a solution, if the problem isn't already fixed.

I don't really have the knowledge to suggest solutions, but I've been debugging long enough to be able to spot problems sometimes even when I'm not very familiar with the underlying material.

We have been hard at work on a solution to solve the spam problem for a long time now, and put more men on the job as the situation worsened over the past few days. Earlier today, we implemented an external API - an anti-spam filter that blocked accounts of known spammers based on IP. It was effective for a time in preventing spam, but later turned out not to be so as spammers began using proxies.

We implemented more anti-spam mechanisms throughout the day, but some spam threads were still getting through. That is why we have added another preventative measure to battle the many spambots that have been attacking our forums - it is no longer possible to create a forum thread if you only have the set of free games you get upon registration in your game library (adding posts to existing topics is not affected). This should rid us entirely of unwanted spam threads, as spambots will be unable and/or unwilling to purchase games.

If this will prove to be a big inconvenience for users, we will remove it - but it should rid us entirely of spam. We will continue working on solutions less restrictive to other users once the flood of spambots is under control.

It seems a good solution for me, overall.
Maybe just create a sticky thread for new users, so they can freely post questions there.

Go to W3Schools, they have a basic SQL tutorial

This seems the best route as there are plenty of topics in most of the sub-forums to ask for help for a particular problem, or you can PM and get some help from someone knowledgeable.

Plus for technical problems there's always asking for help from gog via tickets.



I just hope they don't start spamming all threads rather than making topics as they were, that would be an annoyance...

Well, thank you very much for the update.

As happy as I am that this will stop the spam, you should consider the fact mentioned by Bookwyrm, that it might drive away potential customers. e.g. "I'd liket o buy this game, but let me check in the forums first whether it's the original or remastered version/whether it contains patch x/whether it works on system y/whether it's compatible with graphics card z.... etc What? Can't post? Screw it then".

Is there any option of making it less severe? e.g. if you have only free games, it's impossible to create a forum thread with non-latin characters?

It's possible the admins could manually mark a user as a normal customer and they could post topics, or maybe the first month the limit would be lifted, but it depends on how complex the checks have to be, and the more checks on the DB it has to make the slower it becomes.

I was once on a team making an internal time-sheet database, and there were something like 60 calls/checks to the DB pulling structures and common data and stuff, in the end it ended up taking close to 10-30 seconds to load a single page; This was while it wasn't under load.

This means any checks have to be fairly free of the DB in order to keep such DB calls to a minimum, sometimes incorporating the data structures in the PHP pages rather than calling them from the DB per page, or statically holding them in global memory once the server starts for the day.

However the fewer restrictions you put on the system, the sooner they will find the hole and start using it and it will have to be plugged. Forcing them to have another game from a GA, or buying at the least helps with the huge problem we have been having for over a week.

Honestly i never relied on the forums until months after i was in GoG, so it's probably not going to be as big a problem as it could be. It's not like we're preventing them from asking questions, they just can't make a new topic, and unless it's a new game (which they won't have easy access to unless they buy anyways) then it won't matter. There's plenty of topics to ask for help in most of the sub-forums.


edit: Maybe if the spammers give up the restriction will be lifted, and put back in place when it gets busy again... That would be the easiest resolution.

This approach has been discussed before. I said it then, and I'll say it now: It's a BAD solution! If I found a store that required me to buy something from them before I could even ask questions of the employees and other customers (and really, posting in existing threads doesn't count), I'd leave and never look back.

Dire circumstances call for dire solutions.

But one thing at a time, which includes a much quieter set of forums without the spam. We'll see how things look; Perhaps a week's inconvenience will be all we need before they lift it. It really depends on how determined the spammers are. If the spammers get worse for some reason... I hate to think about that...

It's a good decision imho, you could make a sticky to explain why new users without games can't make threads so that people don't feel offended.
If the bots start spamming threads, you could disable posting in general for non-customers and add it to the sticky.

Good luck

Maybe they'll start buying games. :D

Kind of a moot point now, but I said I'd get back to it, so...

Banning known spammers is fine, provided only a staffer can add them to the list. Let GoG work out which accounts have no games and have apparently been made solely to spam.


I think this is where it gets tricky.
-Checking whether a post blocks certain characters is very dicey; if you pick something common (like a vowel, if you were concerned about english), then you are just asking for trouble when an inept user tries to ask for help.
-Post count checks get in the way if a user asks for help in multiple sub-forums, while they try to figure out which of these free games they want to play in their limited free time...
-All sorts of things can go wrong for a pre-occupied user, like if they are holding a toddler while also trying to do stuff on the computer.


Anyway. My point would be that most arbitrary post checking limits would either tend to be very restrictive for potential new customers, or so broad as to be worthless against the spam bots.