There are still an awful lot of spam posts still visible so if DxO have done anything they certainly haven’t done it very well. It could have gone quite because the bots that created all these posts have moved on to another domain. In which case, they are likely to return at some point.
You would have hoped DXO would have said something but maybe that’s hoping for too much!
Well, it looks like it’s been sorted out, including removing all the spam posts.
Yes, this incident has been fixed but I doubt the problem has been resolved.
There’s also the observation that DxO’s management of this incident wasn’t great, which doesn’t fill anybody with confidence that there problem management is that good either, https://itsm.tools/incident-vs-problem-management/
Once again we are left just living in hope…
I wouldn’t draw similar conclusions from what remains a rather slow reaction to a spam attack. This forum isn’t actually a real part of the company. It’s merely an external forum managed by its moderators and only used by DxO to make announcements and display ads. No support or staff participation here.
My confidence (or the lack of) in the DxO management is not affected by this event. It has not improved either.
Umm, can’t fully agree with you on that. True, the forum is hosted by a third party (Discourse) but all the bills are paid by DxO and only DxO staff have Admin access rights to the forum, i.e. all management and (lack of) moderation of the forum is the sole responsibility of DxO. To me, the financial cost to DxO of providing this forum makes it a real part of the company.
Legally, certainly. But functionally, I don’t think so. I don’t care about the legal aspect of DxO’s management problems. How they actually “function” is more important. And the forum is in practice completely excluded from their functional scope.
Any way the posts are comming back so they cleared old one up but fixed nothing
Indeed, we are in complete agreement there
I do believe it’s an important contributor to their success due to the volunteer contributions of a few individuals in this community. Daily there are problems solved for new and existing users that would otherwise be customer service tickets serviced by paid employees or outsourced staff, or they would be customers who left to find their photo processing solutions elsewhere.
All now looks good to me, John … Perhaps you were a bit too early to the scene.
Its clear now and hopefully will stay clear
There had been a number of new ones which have now gone and were growing in number. Hopefully they have managed a permanent fix. Unfortunately they are back again
Unless they fundamentally changed the parameters/security settings of the forum they seem to be just deleting them when they appear.
Anyway hopefully they have actually tightened the posting privileges down to prevent further spamming. But they aren’t saying and we will only know by waiting to see if it happens again.
Oh well they didn’t. LOL…
Still have spam messages…
Yep — Looks like I “spoke too soon” !!
Regrettably still no word from DXO. Its not as bad as the weekend but clearly it looks like they could flood the forums again if they wanted too
Discourse is apparently using Akismet for spam blocking. Wondering whether it is actually activated, properly setup or if its AI is merely learning slowly . All the spam messages posted since 2 days are very similar and should now be spotted immediately if enough have been flagged.
Another Discourse forum I frequent has no Spam problems, at least not yet.
What I don’t understand is; what were spammers hoping to achieve ?
It’s so obviously spam/rubbish, who would be stupid enuff to click on any of the links ?!
- Just malicious, I guess
Test firing and optimisation in preparation to attack some other discourse forum?
Maybe just malicious, given the machine-like text - but I wonder if the posts are designed to be picked up by search engines and crawlers. There’s a lot of computer-generated stuff like that in search results for anything. Plus, let’s face it, the themes of these posts are strong lures for people who are curious, desperate, or experiencing lowered inhibitions. They could simply be gateways for malware.