Report a suspected Spammer V2.0

**kaanage** · 22-12-2011, 10:31 AM

Would it reduce the workload for moderators if new users could only create and post a single introduction thread item until they were vetted by the moderators?

Hopefully, the introduction post would be easily seen as legitimate or spam. If a new user has to wait a few hours before being able to post in general areas, then I don't think that is too bad a price to pay.

Or can Captcha be implemented for creating a user account and maybe the 1st 5 posts by a new user?

**The_Hawk** · 22-12-2011, 10:54 AM

Yes, many of those things are possible and some have even been used before.

It's a hard balance between keeping new users happy by not putting draconian restrictions on them as well as weeding out the spammers.

We might just have to go back to what we used to do and restrict new users to only be able to post in the newbies section for their first post. This approach didn't stop the spam, but at least it kept it all in one place which made it much easier to identify and clean up. This requirement was dropped because had different methods in place which seemed to work at about 99.9% … sadly that doesn't seem to be the case anymore

Long story short, I'm looking into it.

**kaanage** · 22-12-2011, 11:56 AM

Heck, I had to wait when I joined and it was no big deal.

What you guys have to wade through is ridiculous and I think the legitimate users would be glad to trade off having to wait a bit when joining up vs seeing all the spam posts everywhere when checking for new posts.

**dylan8** · 23-12-2011, 11:28 AM

Originally Posted by kaanage

Heck, I had to wait when I joined and it was no big deal.

What you guys have to wade through is ridiculous and I think the legitimate users would be glad to trade off having to wait a bit when joining up vs seeing all the spam posts everywhere when checking for new posts.

this. making people post in the intro section before they can proceed anywhere should make your lives easier surely...
people that complain about steps like that tend to be a PITA anyway on the forum