A few people have emailed me recently disappointed by the level of spam postings on pastebin.com. I’ve never really understood why spammers bother, but as they are bothering in increasing numbers it was time to take some action.
Last night I built in some spam filtering which has caught hundreds of posts since going live. I also added a “report spam” link which has flagged over 500 posts in past 20 hours. By iteratively tweaking the spam filter to identify the legimately flagged posts, I’ve been able to quickly delete a lot of older spam posts.
Hopefully this will make pastebin look like a well tended garden rather than a run-down wasteland! Comments welcome…
I can only improve it you send me a sample of the ham. If it looks anything like a list of email addresses that is the most likely thing to give it a high score.
My boss asked me to paste the headers of a SPAM mail so we could nail them together, but I can’t. I see that for some odd reason your filtering on email addresses, that would mean that I can’t post header or server logs.
Is there any way to get around that without having to change my post, I really need it to be exactly the same as I received it. Please.
Hi, I am using pastebin 0.60 on a server of mine, and recently had problems with spam too. Is there an updated packaged version with spam control, yet? The link to download from pastebin.com still gives 0.60 .
Would it be possible to have the new package with the spam fighting rules please?
Well just an idea:
Instead of the hated Captcha stuff, just take images of animals. Like a cat. or a dog. Or an elephant. No Bot can see what animal is shown on the image. And it only takes a second to type in “Elephant”.
Btw you’re great. 🙂
Cheerz
@CounterPillow Google has something they are working on similar to that. It asks you what orientation the image is in. Like they make the image round and rotate it, then ask you which side is the bottom. They give you I think 18 options. Anyhow, it is a neat idea.