Spammers will be spammers, as i wrote above, it is epic few mods (not sure how many now) against hundreds if not more spammers.
Epic “improving” (read getting more aggressive) handling spammers, will not help in long run, however it will make life of all “legal” users here more difficult.
Best example is DRM and anti piracy with games, as everybody knows games are pirated anyway, and pirated (cracked) games work better than protected with certain DRMs. Same would happen as result of fight against spammers.
ps.
Epic could make reporting spam easier, with less clicks and no extra login to another page.
I see it as a side effect that can not be avoided. But if we wait now, for say X years, many of the “trusted” profiles of the old years will be gone and replaced with current (future!) AI that are so capable of camouflaging themselves as people. Aren’t the old real human profiles all we have left?
The idea I posted is that, the old profiles can be easier distinguished in trust level from the current AI. This idea does not apply for the future. Old “trusted” profiles are something like a person’s legacy that can be lost, because human profiles will become harder to distinguish over time from AI.
currently we (better said, EPIC) don’t have a super smart AI to deal with unwanted posts. It might be a transition form A to B (potato AI to superhuman) but it’s hard to ignore while we humans are supporting the forums. What we can do as a community is to support EPIC as human moderators (for a fee). If we’re already here (answering X questions for years) then that is totally something EPIC should consider.
This can be hacked on the client side (you and me), while the EPIC server (the forums) would have to be controlled (hacked) in full to bypass moderators. The forums as I see it aren’t comparable to DRM? ?The main complaint? about DRM is that an internet connection is required to a validating server. If we connect to the forums, we already require that connection anyway.
i agree that making it harder for new comers is not ideal. and that epic is struggling to keep up.
i agree with nawrot that reducing the friction to report and moderate could be better than increasing the friction to spam.
though both help.
giving power to users to moderate tend to cause issues imho.
though having a way so that when 3+ users, with more than a year of usage in the forum, report a post, then it gets hidden and awaits for epic’s moderation. would be an interesting idea.
just to share, i’ve started noticing a pattern recently. new accounts asking very vague open questions on their 1st post without any context, screenshot, or link at all. like:
“How do i optimize my game?”
or “My game crashes how do i fix it?”
i really struggle not to reply with a link to a search engine or the docs.
i tried to reply to some like asking for more details, or logs or smth. and then never get a reply from them.
i’ve noticed some of the users that usually answer add some answer, but the original poster never replies (i have notification for those usual replies).
It could be a case of people starting and not reading the docs at all, but the pattern has been consistent and started like … a month ago.
i don’t have the time to check on those accounts, i might be completely mistaken.
but i’m sharing just in case.
btw i’ve also seen these, to a page called izigames, though i’ve seen the exact same game in an exact replica of the site with another url (what a headache!)
they still hide their links with a shortener, and even use different shorteners! so intentionally deceiving.
and they still use dummy accounts.
and it’s still spam.
posts seems ai generated to me
Good catch, It def seems to be from the same spam people, given all those account’s first post was from around the same time with a unrelated UE question then one day later posting promos for the site. Although looking into the site it seems to be an actual web kinda game? What rule would this be violating aside from the mis-tagging the post as UE when it’s some kind of web game
thanks Mineblo
yeah, i noticed that it looks like an “actual web”.
i also contemplated that maybe it was just innocuous.
and maybe is not related to the apk issue (though, tbh, the posts have almost the exact same format, i don’t even need to read them to know).
but still maybe is something to keep an eye on. dunno.
though i wouldn’t discard the fact that it still spam. and it really doesn’t seem to belong here (is not even made with ue).
and that maybe they redirect those shortened links later.
and i really dislike they are being deceitful on those posts. hiding the information. fishy.
While suspicious I don’t think accusing new people is a good way to go,
I’d personally just bookmark their profiles and visit them a day or so later to flag/report the spam post. We won’t go anywhere just by accusing new users to the forums.
For those weird first post asking questions, just google for 5-6 words sentence from post (with some unusual word or two), and in most cases google will find where question was copied from (which means spammers and bots copied and posted it here).
Careful there. I’ve also noticed the pattern of new users posting a few questions, then minutes later their posts are edited to be the “apk post”. The links and descriptions you see on the page referencing them remain outdated (so you read “I need help with X” but end up on APK)! If they use exploits of the forums to send attacks to visitors, just visiting that page would harm you already.
Youre right Roy.
I know enough about security to know you can clone whole webpages. So that web can be a fake.
And like i said, ive searched for one of the games and i found another absolutely identical site with another url. So 99.999% is a clone.
And once cloned they can put all the malware they want.
Oh with all I wrote I meant the forum post itself. I didn’t talk about external links. When people edit post content (different title, different content) all the links to that forum post still show the old title and content. That’s how they trick users.
That is true as well, those are web crawlers. Easy enough to turn the frontend (which you already download upon visit) into static html files. Only thing a copied website can’t have is backend functionality and data access (unless they have access to the database and backend framework as well). For the database that takes just a password string. If a guy copying a website doesn’t have database and backend access he’s likely to remove some of the elements that would otherwise erorr out (like a contact form). But like I said, duping the front end of a website is no effort, don’t need to hack for that.
facepalm.
that reminds me, i’ve seen one that created a profile with a name copying the structure of one of the people from rinho (i think i can’t really remember), one of epics partners that.
Many patterns can be used to trick users… I’m not opening those posts just in case. Tutorials like this could be great (like the WTF is series on youtube), but I distrust the forums that much rn. These are entirely new with no user interaction.
Thinking of it, even Facebook has similar problems. Once I noticed I had (I think) subscribed to artists (music etc.) and some time in the future I looked at my subscriptions and none of it seemed OK or legit. Apparently users create groups, grow the userbase, then fully swap the group content. Either to promote sales (like imagine selling that group 5000 users and making it a group that sells gold watches), or to spread malware, or worse. This forum has the same problems, but to the forum mods the things I post should be obvious / known already. It’s not like I’m spreading new exploits. Users don’t know though.
