flag the spammer please

Previous forums that I've belonged to have had rules such as:

Member must register, and then cannot post for a full week after registration. This keeps someone from creating an account simply to spam away.

Newer members (defined by moderator) are limited to the number of posts they can make in a 24 hour time period. Or, they are limited to the number of new threads they can create during a 24 hour time period. Either one of these is also geared toward foiling a potential spammer.

After a member is no longer "new" (again, defined by moderator), then they are "unlocked" and can post as much as they want. Most spammers are not going to want to wait to be able to do this, so having some sort of pause on them usually kills the problem.

The ideas I have been coming up with are designed to (in my opinion) thwart spam bots, while not inconveniencing real people. And by "Real People," I mean not only new members, but whomever will be moderating.

My five minute rule seems to satisfy that.

At the same time, if someone is bent on spamming manually, there's not a lot that can be done to proactively prevent it.

About a year ago I asked if there was a way to flag a blog and the answer was no. Perhaps it's time to revisit that.

I like the flagging system with a seniority system in place where the number of flags to remove a post is related to your seniority on the forum. That "seniority" may be more based on the amount of time or number of logins over time rather than the number of posts one has made.

A simple stop of the spambots would be a system generated password sent to a email account sent 10 - 15 minutes after the account was setup, and/or the inability to post 15 minutes after joining (what Teddy said). Also, limiting the number of posts to x/day for new members might work as well (something like 5 for the first week).

Anyway, it sounds like jb's got a good handle on it.

There are plenty of "solutions" for the spam "problem."

But this is a very nice, very fast, very high-volume forum. It would be a shame to ruin it with measures like flood-control, or authentications and such, base don one little incident involving a spam-bot. Just flag and ignore. And if it goes to Free speech alert the site admins. And naturally don't click any links or make a big deal about it.

This is not a very high volume forum. Active, but not masses of volumes compared to other ones I use (or at least dip into the edges off).

"There are plenty of "solutions" for the spam "problem." >>>> (lol) Here's part of the issue, some here have different definitions for 'spam'.

Ken

Quote: thecesspit

This is not a very high volume forum. Active, but not masses of volumes compared to other ones I use (or at least dip into the edges off).

Oh, well, depends on what you're comparing it to. Go to any popular videogame's board, especially the manufacturer's, and you'll see thousands of posts a day. We're far from that level (maybe not me, but still... <w>). But for a relatively small, specialized (more or less) board, we don't lack for content.