anti-SPAM

[dgg9]

We seem to get more than our share of spammers (always pushing cell phones, for some reason).

It may or may not work here, but on some boards new members can't start topics until after their 5th post. Or maybe <5 post members have a keyword search in posts for "Nokia" etc.

I don't have "the" answer, but there are options out there.

[OneLungMcClung]

Good call dgg9! Another part that I posted today is this:

IF our spam is being delivered by Bots, we should get an image verification system (or a better one if we have one already ) based not just on letters but also on pictures (like showing my Very Cool avatar and saying "what type of animal is this", and the answer would be "cat" or "kitty".)

The other thing that is possible is to have an innocuous sounding Forum like "tech help" or "announcements" that is a parking lot for these vermin. IT's ok to have two forums by the same name - another of my forums does this and has two named "tech help". The one at the top is for spambots - every member knows this and doesn't bother going in there.

Other Admins/ Mods/ SysOps have said it best: this is a never ending battle against these people.

[deth502]

on one fourum i posted on- your first five posts were "submitted" to the admin. and he would have to approve them to post. after that you could post as you please.

btw-- i was looking to buy an i-phone off of someone- preferably a douchbag from the UK, but i cant find any posts here to help me ????

[danp]

When I first set up the forum I did have CAPTCHAs (image verification) for the registration, and I found two things:

1) These apparently confuse a much larger amount of 'real' people that I ever would have imagined. I got emails all the time from people who couldn't seem to figure it out

2) The spam posters are not actually robots, but people in many cases.

I like both the suggestions put forward but...

I don't want to moderate people's posts as that can be a slow and time consuming task for the moderators, and I would be concerned that if we did a "Can't start a thread until you post a few times", all we would end up with is spammers spamming multiple existing threads until they reached the limit. On top of that many new members come here to ask a specific question and I don't want to make people jump through too many hoops to do so or we're just shooting ourselves in the foot community wise.

I'm not sure why spam has jumped this week, for the past few months we've had almost none, but this week we got hit by 3 or 4 guys.

Not sure what the best solution is either, but for me I'd rather delete some spam now and then (which ultimately doesn't hurt anything except for being annoying) and not mess with legitimate poster's ability to do what they need to do and say what they need to say.