What to do about the spammers?

[razamanaz]

Now we need to come up with an official "operation" title for our little spam strike....

Operation SPAM SLAM

[Stefaan]

If you had a script that targeted abuse reports marked as spam to temporarily hide the message that would speed up removing them from public sight. Of course it could become abused.

Madrat,

Excellent idea! Need to think about this and figure out how to implement it, but would be really useful.

stefaan

[neurotech]

How about not allowing "newbies" to start topics in the main forums. Make them get at least 10 posts before starting a topic.

Another option is to use a "de-flood" system. If a user joins, and makes more than a certain number of posts/topics quickly, flag all their posts and consider hiding their topics/posts until mods have had a chance to review.

[Sharkey]

How about not allowing "newbies" to start topics in the main forums. Make them get at least 10 posts before starting a topic.

Another option is to use a "de-flood" system. If a user joins, and makes more than a certain number of posts/topics quickly, flag all their posts and consider hiding their topics/posts until mods have had a chance to review.

I think these are super ideas, and we can still use the Predator as a backup when needed

[mor10]

Perhaps tracking IP addresses could help preventing some spammers as well as returning trolls. If a spammer sits behind a normal home hub all his computers will have the same IP address when contacting a web server, so blocking him once will keep I'm blocked until his home hub get's a new IP address, which normally happens if the hub is replaced, which is not often. The same goes for banned users. It looks like each time one person is blocked a new user pops up with more or less the same attitude and trolling. Blocking the IP address would make it harder to reappear to easily.

Another useful function of tracking the IP address is geolocation. There are times a users views and questions indicates he's not where he claims to be located or from. Why not have and additional geo-location field under the user name, visible to other users on the forum that shows at leas country and if known also the town (often the town of the ISP).

[JoeSambor]

You could solve a lot of problems in this forum if users were required to provide verifiable identification information. Not only would it allow better screening of who is allowed to post, but it would add some credibility. Users could opt in or out to allow other users to see their credentials. Those not opting in would not be allowed to see the information of others.

I am also in favor of blocking posts until a certain amount of time has passed. It would eliminate the spammers.

I understand this is easily said and not easily done. Why not go to a subscription model?

Best Regards,

[Bjorn]

Guys,

We did a lot of the above things already, without going into detail.

But I agree we ought to take a look at it once again to see if we can further finetune this.

Greets,

[neurotech]

We did a lot of the above things already, without going into detail.

But I agree we ought to take a look at it once again to see if we can further finetune this.

I have been known to write PHP code if you would like assistance.

[f-22lm]

There are a whole lot of spammers in the F-16 section. Here's one named "monisha"

[neurotech]

There are a whole lot of spammers in the F-16 section. Here's one named "monisha"

They come up with different usernames, so banning that user doesn't help for more than a short time. I usually report post as soon as I see it.

[sketch22]

Locate their IP address and pinpoint their location. Lets give the F-35 a chance to test out its precision strike capabilities.