Anti-spam measure

[bgk]

Hi Guys,

As you may have noticed we've been facing massive amounts of spam over the past several weeks. As a countermeasure I've made it so that all new members must wait for a moderator to approve a post before they will display.

This is obviously burdensome on the moderators, all of whom have better things to do be doing, but will have to do for now.

That reminds me - if anyone is interested in helping out with moderating the forums, your help would be greatly appreciated. Obviously we would only accept certain candidates, but if you want to throw your hat in the ring .. send me a PM.

That's all for now.

-bgk

[GreenePony]

Another forum I am on is doing similar- however they also have a (secret) rotating number of times the new poster must be approved before they have free rein so that spam bot aren't just set to go over that number. It seems to work fairly well (but like you said, it relies heavily on the mods).

[PhoenixM]

Could always set a 30 minutes to 1 hour limit on the number of new topics created for those under x amount of posts.

It won't stop the spam, but it will make it much more difficult to flood the forum.

Edited July 24, 2012 by PhoenixM

[Usmivka]

This seems to be working really well, thank you!

[Eigen]

A few spammers seem to be really smart about posting something relevant, then spamming once approved, but definitely fewer.

Please do report spam if you see it, though- I see lots of spam posts that I'm deleting have downvotes on the OP, but no report- if you're going to take the time to downvote it, please just take the time to report it as spam.

[fuzzylogician]

Just to clarify what Eigen wrote: mods can easily see spam reports so we can delete those posts as soon as someone sees and reports them. If those posts are just down-voted but not reported, the only way we can find them is if we happen to be reading that post on our own. We don't always read through all the forums, though, and we can get busy sometimes so it may take us longer to notice spam that way. So, if you see something just report it - no need to say anything other than 'spam' as the reason for the report. It'll save us a lot of time and make the forum more user-friendly for everyone.