You can. When I flag them for off-topic the post gets hidden till someone reviews it, usually by deleting the post.
Keep your eye for posts that don’t mention the word APK. Was keeping my eye on this account for suspicious behavior and posts and they made afterwards a spam post without mentioning the word APK.
2 Likes
Huh, I guess I always picked another option. I get redirected to an external epic page to go through a secondary login process and form (to keep me from reporting I suppose).
So next time someone posts something illegal, dangerous to my health, or your average malware spam, I say " it’s off topic " LOL.
1 Like
So I’ve been thinking about plenty of ways this can be stopped, and (obviously) every time I came to the conclusion that what we can do a bot can do (either now or in the future).
So what about this:
We take community profiles from the past with an above average reputation (like the guys who frequently answered questions in the past 3 years ), and we add those to a review group, similar to a forum mod (rights altered to be less). I would trust this more than I a new profile providing a picture of their ID card!
Every time a user with a below average reputation (low amount of answers, or even low ratio of answers vs questions) attempts to ask a question, this group gets to rate them for -1 or +1. Be it if their question is a duplicate (also a bot symptom), below average quality, or suspicious.
Only when reviewed by us, and the user reaches a rating we can calculate (X +), such user gets to post a question.
I’d suggest that user would still be able to answer other questions, or edit posts etc., but that would lead back to exploits again. The user is basically silenced and put in cue. New users generally post many (and lowers quality) questions and no answers. Posts edited bypass EPICs content filters on initial post contet entirely (how did that bypass your programmers anyway?).
I figured that with the amount of daily “trusted” community members showing up, this would be a short daily cue to handle. If this idea is not flawed, and we can make some estimations on past data, it could save us a headache and save EPIC money on reports flowing in.
Can we make a deal then?
If nothing changes, the amount of loyal, willing community members will just decline. Oh did that happen before 
.
1 Like
I think limiting users from asking questions will be more negative than positive and wouldn’t really affect spammers as they could just switch to a different type of post to “normalize” their account. I disagree, I feel the flagging tool is good enough, In my case just flagging it once Immediately hides the post temporarily, maybe the duration before they can re-edit their post after it gets hidden could be increased from 10 mins to possibly an hour so staff have enough time to take down the posts/accounts.
1 Like
It would halt spammers unless they buy (or hack) an account with an above average reputation. A different type of post (the discussion type?) must go through the same process. This is a rate limiting process. All spammers can do is attempt to post 999999 questions a minute which would be detectable.
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.
2 Likes
Yes!
Well yes
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.
1 Like
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
1 Like
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
1 Like
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.
1 Like
Good point, didn’t even think about this.
Regardless I guess not being UE/FNC/Fab/MetaHuman etc would be fair to be considered off-topic.
Definetely not, what kind of innocent person would make 3 accounts, and make fake UE question posts.
Also I would reckon those posts break the Create your post only once rule.
2 Likes
Is this suspicious or what?
Look at the times of these two. And the format.
2 Likes
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.
Youre right thanks. Ill check it out later.
1 Like
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).
2 Likes
It’s crapGPT… It always uses that list format, with highlights… 
5 Likes
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.
2 Likes