What is wrong with spamming? The site literally is nothing more than a text entry box, and there are no admins present to prevent it anyway. This is why IRC and other things have ops, with the ability to kick users... I'd say this is more the fault of the developer

yes, school wifi is very bad.

Yes.
I completely agree, noticing that most of the spamming happened when I was not online. I do have the ability to ban users, though.

The site actually is more than a text entry box, though, but I get your point.
The increased admin presence and the anti-spam protection we are adding should help with this.



Actually, our school’s WiFi is quite good, but the abundance of steel, concrete and other non-radio wave-friendly materials makes us feel that we could flip a light switch faster than the bitrate.

hehe, no worry, you meant no harm... Now to find the people who thought it was OK to spam...

Now, all of the moderators/admins on my team can ban (by IP, and username, for any length of time), mute, delete messages, and force users to change their username.

They have been informed that abuse of these privileges is strictly disallowed and that all of their actions are recorded.

Note that we only store IP's in a heavily encrypted form, and they cannot be accessed by anyone besides the person who is banned (so that their local browser can tell they are banned) and the admins (to remove and add bans as necessary)

We also have spam protection, and it's pretty strong. I produced about 40 bots that should represent a bunch of different spamming methods. Each is slightly different, and the service both identifies them and mutes them for a short amount of time. The amount of time increases exponentially each time spam is detected, until they are muted for a day. Once they are muted for a day, they are put on a list for admin checking, and bans will be issued.

Messages are collapsed so that messages that are the same are not sent, but the timestamp changes on the original message to the most recent time and a tag appears that indicates the number of times the message was sent. (e.x. [6x] for a message that was sent six times consecutively).

Messages now have a minimum character limit of 2 characters. (Increased from 1, this shouldn't affect most users too much, the objective is to increase the amount of effort required to spam.)

If you send 8 messages in 15 seconds, then a 15-second cooldown is applied to you. A quick search of the DB showed that this is matched almost all of what I'd consider spam, but only applied once to non-spam messages, and it was because I am a failure at typing and had to correct myself a bunch of times.

We will not release this update until it has been tested under large quantities of strain that it should hopefully never go through under abusive users.

Now, a quick survey. There are other options besides IP tracking, and they are outlined in the form below. Please tell me what you prefer, as we are split.
(Responses are anonymous, it makes you sign in to Google to limit responses-per-user to one)

Thanks!
Survey here

Does this mean that ~ReleaseTheSpamCatchingBots will be tied to these bots?? If not, it should...!

The purpose of these client side bots are simply to spam in ways that replicate a human.

They are just debug/testing tools.

How about you limit the number of consecutive posts you can make to ~5 before you have to wait several seconds? Or, someone who posts a bunch of spam is kicked for several minutes, if it happens again they get kicked for longer, a third time they get "suspended" until an admin/ moderator either allows them to stay, or bans them forever.
UniChat isn't completely useless as it use to be, I want to see it continue to prosper.

Coloring is mine.

What happened to Unichat? I pulled up the website and got this:

Oh it was up the other day so i only assumed.

A few days ago, on November 27, you would have seen me being rather frustrated about someone deleting the DB.

It turns out, my panic was all over nothing, as it was due to unscheduled downtime from 12:00-12:30 PM PT (Pacific Time), or 3:00-3:30 PM EST (my time, Eastern Standard Time), which is EXACTLY when I do most of my development on UniChat during the school week.

My logs show that I uploaded the backup at 3:34, and when I reloaded the page, it worked.

Well, that's not because of anything I did, it's just because that's when they got their service to work.

(I didn't even know Firebase even HAD a status dashboard)

Source: https://status.firebase.google.com/incident/Realtime%20Database/17094

I have created a temporary website, with the sole purpose of generating spam and key mash.

https://legend-of-iphoenix.github.io/spam/

It’s super basic, because I made it in 30 seconds.

Please spam and key mash.

If the message does not disappear from the text area, then it was either too short or too long.

Thanks!

When I press enter, it starts a new line. Is that supposed to happen? Also, does it keep the history?

You press the button to send your message.

It is 100% anonymous, the only thing stored is what you type.

You can’t see anyone else’s messages because that’s not the point. The point is just for you to create a bunch of low quality messages, so I can get a lot of spam examples.

Because of an excellent idea by 123outerme over on CW, statistics on what you type into the Spam-Storing Pit of Death are now displayed.

Apparently, I have legitimately typed over 3000 characters of me key-mashing the heck out of my keyboard, can you do better?

legit 6336... Spammers copy/paste!

I know. I temporarily shut down the service once I saw all of the QWERTYUIOP...'s in the DB, and how much of an idiot I am.

I'm fixing it.

Edit:
It's back up, and fixed!

Just a friendly reminder for everyone using the service, remember that the service does not exist for you to rack up your score, but rather for me to collect a bunch of different samples of spam and (especially) key mash.

Edit: 125000 character milestone was reached at 3:05 with the character... uhh... I do not personally agree with the emoji, but it was definitely spam.

I changed the bulky character statistics table to a much more friendly HTML5 canvas bar graph.

It is live-updating, and you can see the exact relative quantity of characters!

While developing it, I found it quite interesting to watch