Feature request: Quick Author Ban

MrEman · Post by **MrEman** » Wed Dec 17, 2008 3:38 pm

Ever read your headers only to fine some looser has posted a flood of virus?

You know it will pass and is only a temporary thing.....

So what about a feature that would enable a one time Quick Ban for an Author?
Find a virus flood......right click......Ban Author

Also would be nice if we could "Stack" banning of an Author ..... Multiple Author banning

Quick and easy....

or is there an easy way already there that I have overlooked? (It has happened before)

I am familiar with the ^offendingauthorhere way in the Author field of quick filters but sometimes I make typo's or the author 's name has some odd ascii character....

zot · Post by **zot** » Thu Dec 18, 2008 2:34 am

The virus-posters will of course keep changing their tactics. (I've noticed that the size of trojan files keeps getting bigger) It seems like many of them spam for a few hours before changing to a new username. Right now, they often use unique usernames and spew continuously, giving filtering tools additional parameters to focus on, but their methods will no doubt evolve to try to stay one step ahead of the users. (right now, I'd say they are many steps ahead) This will be a long war that will probably never end.

I'm sure the main problems are that:

1. no one is reporting these people to their providers

2. the server software is doing such a terrible job of identifying and filtering these virus posts (How many legitimate posters would post a million copies of the same 100KB .exe file?)

MrEman · Post by **MrEman** » Thu Dec 18, 2008 3:50 am

My intent is not to have UE do anything automatically

Just to allow me to manually select an Author and choose to ban him without having to write any filters

zot · Post by **zot** » Thu Dec 18, 2008 9:37 pm

The ability to filter by author, NNTP provider, file size, file extension, number of parts, etc, all help, but there's just so much spammed virus junk these days that it can be hard to sort through.

It seems that a lot of people still use the default Yencpowerpost or JBinUp usernames when they post, including the spammers. Maybe one solution might be to filter by "poster combined with filesize" to separate the good releases (such as 100x15MB sets) made by "Yenc@power-post.org" from the trojans (such as 1x50KB). Also, there are times when the name of the attached file does not match the name of the article subject.

I've been told that it's not possible to know a post's NNTP provider just by the header, until it has been downloaded. But I wonder if there might be some way of auto-downloading enough of the file (or all if a small file) to get that info?

MrEman · Post by **MrEman** » Fri Dec 19, 2008 4:50 pm

Maybe in addition to a quick ban on an author we could get a quick
"Report abuse" feature????

With a right click UE would gather the info on the poster and automatically send an abuse report to the Provider??????