Spam control

[paulnattress]

Just an idea about spam control.

All new members have to have their first 2 (or however many) post viewed by a moderator before they can be posted on the forums. If any of these posts are spam, they can be deleted along with the member's account. One way for a spammer to get around this is to create several posts with meaningless content in the, such as "Hi, I like your site, it's great." but I'm sure an intelligent moderator can spot these.

If the above feature can't be implemented, is there any way to do it by using the group promotion feature?

[bfarber]

You can do this with the group promotion feature already, yes.

Create a new group that can bypass forum post ques.

Set your members group cannot bypass post moderation, and set to promote to the new group after 2 posts.

Force all your forums to require moderator approval of posts before they are live. Your new group can "bypass" this, while the member's group cannot.

[paulnattress]

Brilliant, I'll try that.

One question though, do the two posts that are awaiting moderation add towards the number of posts required for promotion? I was thinking that a spammer could simply add 3 or 4 posts to get around this method.

[Jimmy S]

While that is true, from the spam that I've gotten on my site, they post once and leave. I never gave them a chance to come back so I don't know if they would or not. But that should work for you how your thinging of setting it up. It will at the very least help control the spam and keep it to a bare minimum.

[R0CKY]

The problem with this suggestion, is that it still means work for board staff - in this case a lot of work! Previewing the first two posts of all new members is a very labour intensive idea for busy boards, and it is busy boards that spammers are looking to attack.

Whether your board staff are manually identifying occasional spam and deleting it, or manually checking every new post a new member makes, it's mucho work.

I made a different suggestion here that would have the board automatically identify potential spam (I would hazard a guess this system would catch 99% of spam on my board), and only mean work for the moderators when there was actually spam to deal with, rather than work even when there is no spam in sight (ie checking all new member postings, of which only a tiny percent will actually be spam).

[Ryan H.]

The problem with bfarber's suggestion is that it eliminates the possibility of having a moderating queue in other boards for those people--on a larger board struggling with this [such as the one I moderate] you would be forced to choose the lesser of two 'evils'. A better alternative, though it would indeed require a modification, would be per-rank filtering or something of the sort. My suggestion would also be very helpful in dealing with these problems--similar, I suppose, to Rocky's, but with the element of customization and expansion.

For the record, for the past two weeks our forum has been dealing with a spammer who has yet to tire out. Content filtering works for a moment until he changes the content. We can ban each account, which is what we've been doing, but it takes time and leaves too much room for error in our users finding the malicious posts. IP-banning doesn't work as he uses proxies, and his email accounts are from all over the web. Administrative validation has been enabled a couple times, but it's practically impossible to tell the real accounts from our spammer.

It's a mess. =/

[paulnattress]

I've now installed a spam protection mod and have set it up so that it checks for at least one web address/link or email address in a user's first 2 posts. It then moves them to a member group where they don't have permission to post and also makes their posts invisible. I get a PM to tell me of this. It's not ideal as it involves manual checking but my boards are really quiet so it's not too much of a hassle. I'll see how it goes.