[MacNNUK]

Anti-Spam as used very successfully on another forum

Please consider this option.

In an effort to reduce spam in the forums by new members who only register in order to post spam, restrictions have been imposed on all new registrations.

1) The first 2 (two) posts that a new member makes are put into a moderation queue before being posted in the open forums. A moderator or administrator then reviews the post and the user account for validity and suitability. If the post is nothing but spam, the account is immediately banned and the post never sees the light of day in the forums. If the post is not spam, it is approved and shows up where it was intended to be posted. After 2 posts have been approved by a member of the staff, the 3rd post will not need moderation and the user account is "promoted" to full posting privileges.

2) Until a new user account has been approved and vetted in the above manner, the account has NO private message privileges. Again, this is due to new users registering for spamming purposes only. They use the PM system without ever making a post in the forums. As with above, once the new member has posted 2 posts and the account has been approved and vetted, full board privileges are instated.

[Love Calm Quiet]

I'm liking the sounds of this.

At first glance it might seem to produce more work for moderators.

At second... might end up *reducing* work.

??? Worth a try ??? (assuming vBulletin makes it easy)

[Sage]

From running a similarly-sized forum, I can say that approving every new member’s post would be a huge task. What we do is when a new member posts, their first post gets analyzed by a spam filter, and if it flags the post all of that member’s posts will get shuttled to the mod queue for review. Works remarkably well, and has almost completely eliminated spam from getting posted while still keeping our workload tolerable.

[MacNNUK]

Originally Posted by Sage 

From running a similarly-sized forum, I can say that approving every new member’s post would be a huge task. What we do is when a new member posts, their first post gets analyzed by a spam filter, and if it flags the post all of that member’s posts will get shuttled to the mod queue for review. Works remarkably well, and has almost completely eliminated spam from getting posted while still keeping our workload tolerable.

Having reported the same drug dealing SPAM in different new "members" posts for a few days now, I would welcome this too.

[turtle777]

This has been suggested times and times before.

IIRC, there were two reasons that this wasn't implemented:

a) resources - not enough mods to handle all that
b) not a simple change to the vBulletin software - restricting privileges like this would need special tinkering with the forum software, which any later update could break.

That's not to say that I'm against it. Far from it, I would make the first 5 posts moderated.

-t

[MacNNUK]

Two more Spammy's this morning, so far

I think they spam early so that they get some exposure before Mods wake up, in USA

[Peter]

nothing more annoying than having an urgent issue; asking on these forums; having to wait for a moderator to approve your post.
that'd kill MacNN instantly

[MacNNUK]

Originally Posted by Peter 

nothing more annoying than having an urgent issue; asking on these forums; having to wait for a moderator to approve your post.
that'd kill MacNN instantly

But only for the first couple of posts.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Peter 

nothing more annoying than having an urgent issue; asking on these forums; having to wait for a moderator to approve your post.
that'd kill MacNN instantly

Originally Posted by MacNNUK 

But only for the first couple of posts.

It would be a balance between "OMG!!!!! My MAC is teh pwnzorad!!!11!!!" and "Death to spammers!" I agree that there would be a few people who register just for one issue that's plaguing them who would have to wait a while (not very long given our current staffing) to have their posts show up, but I doubt it would be more than "annoying".

[seanc]

As long as the queue is global, it should fine.

Given our current levels of staff and geographic locations, there should always be at least *one* moderator online to approve posts. If not, someone needs to move to another part of the world for the benefit of MacNN forums.

[CharlesS]

Most of the time when there's a spam post, it gets deleted by the admins before the majority of the members ever see it - they're doing a pretty good job. So I'd say the spam problem is defined more in terms of work for the admins rather than for the members. A solution that reduced the work for the admins would make sense, but this sounds like it would be a heck of a lot more work than just doing the current whack-a-mole, deleting the spam when it pops up.

What could work would be if it were possible to scan new members' posts using some kind of Bayesian spam filter (or perhaps even a simple scan for the names of certain... pharmaceuticals, including permutations such as replacing 'i' with '1', 'a' with '4', etc), and then a post could need to be reviewed by a moderator if it got marked positive by the spam filter. That could reduce the work by a fair amount, but I suspect it'd be complicated to implement.

[Simon]

In my experience it's working pretty well the way it is. I report about a half dozen spam posts per week. The mods are usually very fast to react. The next time I check back it's usually gone. I doubt many people get to see spam on this board. Kudos to the mods.

[MacNNUK]

It can't be that difficult to monitor newbie SPAMS.

Around 1 a day I see on MacNN, even on my cached RSS feeds.

I wonder how many non SPAMMING newbies there are every day total ?

[reader50]

Over the last month, we averaged ~65 (44-99) new registrations per day. Spammer bans are more erratic, usually 80-150 per month, but in fact anywhere from 0-60+ per day. The average would be 3-5 per day, excluding the occasional serious attack.

[brassplayersrock²]

spammer was spotted and baninated this morning,

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by reader50 

Over the last month, we averaged ~65 (44-99) new registrations per day. Spammer bans are more erratic, usually 80-150 per month, but in fact anywhere from 0-60+ per day. The average would be 3-5 per day, excluding the occasional serious attack.

Wow, I'm amazed. I did no think you'd have that many new registrations.

-t

[brassplayersrock²]

another spammer bites the dust tonight.

[ThinkInsane]

Originally Posted by Simon 

In my experience it's working pretty well the way it is. I report about a half dozen spam posts per week. The mods are usually very fast to react. The next time I check back it's usually gone. I doubt many people get to see spam on this board. Kudos to the mods.

I agree. More often than not, by the time I receive a spam report and go to take care of it, the post is gone and the spammer banned. Now that we have more mods on board, the spam gets taken care of pretty quickly.

[SSharon]

MacNN does a great job of removing spam. I know that every time I have reported it it has been deleted promptly. Do the mods receive duplicate messages when multiple people report posts?

[OreoCookie]

Yes, we do, each abuse report gets sent to the resident mods.

The advantage we have is that we always have someone on duty. At least two current mods reside in Europe. Which means at least one of us is awake

We've discussed the other measures proposed here, but we're handling the amount of spam quite nicely at the moment. We're working on improvements, though, although not all are technically feasible yet. Certain providers in China and India could be put on a blacklist, but we can only ban IPs and not domains. Ideally, we would ban *.[provider].com.cn and kill them all. But since they use many non-sequential IP ranges, we cannot ban them easily.

vBull (with reader's help, he deserves a lot of credit) has added some nice options (Delete Spam which automatically bans the nick and allows to search the IP, things we had to do manually before).