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Add anti-spam support

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Add anti-spam support

Postby tonghuix » Wed Feb 14, 2018 10:18 am

Hi admins,

Recently, a lot of spam threads posted in the forum. So I suggest installing a anti-spam addon for posting new thread.

Hope it can reduce spam posting.
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Re: Add anti-spam support

Postby Gijs » Wed Feb 14, 2018 11:15 am

Hi,

We already have various anti spam measures that block the vast majority of spam. Nevertheless there can always be more, but there is a fine balance between accessibility and anti-spam. Luckily there is a forum update coming up shortly that will give us some additional tools, so I expect it to decrease further in the near future.

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Re: Add anti-spam support

Postby wkitty42 » Wed Feb 14, 2018 4:52 pm

we went with having to approve posts by moderators before they show... we don't have the spam problem any more... i don't remember if we went with 3 or 5 approvals before unfetterd posting was allowed but it definitely helped... we still get them registering but they can't/don't go anywhere... especially since we also delete unvalidated accounts after a week or two... that, by itself, helps to give a better idea of real actual accounts... the next step is to remove those that haven't posted in a long while (eg: 5+ years)... but that's us on another forum...
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Re: Add anti-spam support

Postby Gijs » Thu Feb 15, 2018 5:42 am

We already delete unactivated and unused accounts every now and then. Requiring first time posters to get their posts reviewed is against my idea of accessibility and is not proportional to the amount of spam that gets through ;-)
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Re: Add anti-spam support

Postby Thorsten » Thu Feb 15, 2018 7:29 am

Agree with Gijs, the actual amount of spam in the forum is modest, and having your first post(s) reviewed does not make for a welcoming atmosphere in my experience.
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Re: Add anti-spam support

Postby AndersG » Thu Feb 15, 2018 1:36 pm

I agree with the above too, and, additionally, it is probably quicker to let new posters be reviewed by all and collectively spot the spam bots. You (all of you :) do use the !-button when seeing spam, don't you?
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Re: Add anti-spam support

Postby wkitty42 » Thu Feb 15, 2018 4:32 pm

well, to be honest, we deliberated and debated and argued for quite a while before at least trying it... we were getting spam posts outnumbering legitimate posts until we tried it... there was a time, too, that we had like 20 moderators specifically to catch and remove the spam to a spam_bucket area so it could be looked over and analyzed as seed for a firewall mod... now we have only three or possibly four moderators and no where near the amount of work we used to deal with... now we are doing all support and occasionally correcting each other's mistakes...

anyone who has been on a forum that has been inundated with spammy posts will fully understand having the initial few posts validated... it is only three posts or so depending on your settings... yes, it puts a little more work on the mods but it only takes a second to click on the [APPROVE] or [DELETE] buttons ;)
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"Why not?" said Gurder.
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Re: Add anti-spam support

Postby curt » Thu Feb 15, 2018 5:06 pm

For what it's worth, I personally would vote for new users starting with the moderated flag and then becoming full members after one sensible post. This is my policy for the flightgear-devel mailing list (due to some past issues.) The mailing list is a little different though, we can't catch and delete a spam message once it goes out through an email list server.

However, the general consensus of the other forum moderators is as Gijs states. The level of spam moderation is probably less than the work load of starting everyone off in with a moderated flag set. And there is a perception that starting out new users in moderated mode is less welcoming. So I'm happy to go with the consensus of the other moderators -- they do much more of the moderating work than I do.

By the way, ongoing thanks should be extended to Gijs for doing a bunch of work to setup and test the newest version of the forum software and to migrate our forum database over to it ... there will be a short outage at some point when we make the cut-over official... Gijs is setting this up and testing it out for us.

Maybe this is also a good place to point out that our forum is being backed up daily to a secure[1] offsite location that keeps a number of full backups and incrementals extending back several months. Hopefully we never have to test this out, but it's there in case ...

[1] By secure I mean guarded by a very loud german shepherd with large teeth.
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