New Anti-Spam Features

[Jeff Tirey]

I have been working hard all week to clear the forum of spam. It's a cat and mouse game but for now, we are winning.
I rewrote the registration page just for giggles because I still get a few human spammers everyday creating accounts.
ucp.php?mode=register <-- must be logged out to see registration page.

Jeff

[modus.irrealis]

Hi Jeff,

This seemed like a good place to post this, but I've been noticing that there's still some spam that makes it through, so I was wondering if it would'nt be better to lift the review of new members' posts. I don't know if anybody else shares my concerns, but these older posts pop up occasionally and I'm never sure if the posters are still around hoping for a response, and it's hard for them to do follow-up posts and stuff. And since it seems to me that it's new blood that'll keep these forums going (it seems that most people here, including me, love responding to questions more than asking them ), it should help overall with generating activity.

Then again, I have no idea how much spam makes it through the registration process and posts, so the policy might be the only thing keeping us from getting flooded by spam...

[thesaurus]

I agree that it's important to strike a balance between fighting spam and encouraging new posters. Based on my moderating of the Latin and General forums, spam is common. I probably block a spammer a day. I'm sure there are others in other forums I don't moderate. I'm realizing that most of their user names are formed by a random name plus a few numbers, like "astf423".

I try to be fast about approving messages, but sometimes there are days when I can't get to it. It would probably help to have more than one moderator for each forum. There's not much to it besides approving/disapproving new posts.

I also think a 100 post minimum is pretty high for hyperlinks permission, but then again I'm not sure of how big of a problem this could be. And perhaps new users should only need their first five posts approved, as most spammers seem to be one-shot operations.

[furrykef]

I think the automatic anti-spam features are probably just insufficient. I go to forums bigger than this with no post approval process and they never have spam.

[Carolus Raeticus]

Hello!

I also think a 100 post minimum is pretty high for hyperlinks permission, but then again I'm not sure of how big of a problem this could be. And perhaps new users should only need their first five posts approved, as most spammers seem to be one-shot operations.

Hm, did I miss something? I thought that the current forum rules state that "links or site suggestions" are legal after the first 10 posts. Has that changed without being reflected in the written forum rules?

4. New Textkit users are prohibited from posting images and links or site suggestions in their signatures until they have made 10 posts. <-- This will get your account deleted
5. No-Follow commands are placed on all forum links until the Textkit user has made 100 posts.

Being able to cite other Internet ressources is very important. I am, for example, working on re-creating Paul Diederich's "Basic Vocabulary" with the English translations taken from other Public-Domain dictionaries (mostly Gonzalez Lodge). Once I am finished I intend to post a hyperlink to the file on my web-site as it might be of use to others. If I had to wait until after the first 100 postings, I probably would not be allowed to do so until 2012. That can't be really the intention, can it. Damn those spammers that having to think about this sort of things is even necessary.

By the way, what is a "no-follow command"?

Bye,

Carolus Raeticus

[furrykef]

By the way, what is a "no-follow command"?

It means that search engines will ignore the link. Spammers usually post spam not to make forum users visit the page, but to boost their page's Google ranking. A link that's nofollow'd, though, will not boost their page's ranking, rendering the spam worthless. (However, it's still there, so it still needs to be cleaned up.)

[modus.irrealis]

Thanks thesaurus for the response.

I try to be fast about approving messages, but sometimes there are days when I can't get to it. It would probably help to have more than one moderator for each forum. There's not much to it besides approving/disapproving new posts.

Since I complained, I might as well say that if it's a matter of just approving new posts, I'd be willing to do that. I do visit the forum very regularly.

Our some of the spammers getting around the no links things somehow, because The_Dress_Specialist (most current post in the d'Ooge forum) seems to be spam and has one post and a link -- although it seems to not be enclosed in the [url] code things. Is it the forum that converts all urls to links or is it something on my side?

[furrykef]

Is it the forum that converts all urls to links

Yep.

[edufdezb]

I wonder what is the average time to get a post approved under th enew features ? since my fisrt one was approved rather quickly but not the others.