4 ways to improve the handling of spam members

[Feld0]

I love how effective the IPS Spam Service is at catching spam registrations. However, a niggling gripe I have with it is how long it takes to clean my database of spam members.

Adding the following options would greatly improve this part of IP.Board, in my opinion:

• Allow registration to be denied entirely for specific "spam codes". Currently, the most sever action the board can take against a spam account is to "Register the account but immediately mark it as banned". It would be great if we had the option of not allowing code 4 spammers to make an account at all, and this is one of the things I love about the third-party StopForumSpam hooks.
  
  • If a user is prevented from registering because this option is selected, the board admin should be able to set a custom "registration denied" message, where a false positive member could contact an admin via email and have an account created for them manually.
    
    

[*]Add a "delete members" button to the list of spammers in the ACP. Currently, we only have the option to ban or unban them. To remove a spammer account, it has to first be banned, then deleted from the list of banned members. I don't want spam accounts to be mixed together with legitimate banned members (like trolls and rulebreakers), whose accounts should be retained for the purpose of record-keeping. The current setup makes it very easy to accidentally delete a banned member while cleaning up spammers. [*]Add an option to prune spammer accounts after a specified length of time. We have this for validating accounts. Why not spammers?
There is no reason to keep spam accounts in the database, as they never have any actual history with the community. Adding the four features I suggested would make it much easier to deal with them, and provide a lot of granularity over what exactly to do with them, while providing an option for falsely flagged members to get past the filter.

[Royzee]

IPS should never ( NEVER ) register a known spammer.

Whether they are put in a banned, or group that cannot post is not pertinent, it makes useless and unnecessary work for admin.