Suggestion to Prevent Spam

[Arabella 4]

In light of the pornographic spam that we saw in Off Topic today, I'd like to make a suggestion that all new accounts are required to post an introduction in the New Members section before they are allowed to post openly.

I was a member of another online forums group and when I tried to make a post, I received a message that I had to first make a post in the New Members thread before my account was allowed to post in the other sections.

Just a thought!

[ScottThuy 140]

In light of the pornographic spam that we saw in Off Topic today, I'd like to make a suggestion that all new accounts are required to post an introduction in the New Members section before they are allowed to post openly.

I was a member of another online forums group and when I tried to make a post, I received a message that I had to first make a post in the New Members thread before my account was allowed to post in the other sections.

Just a thought!

one extra post by the spammer would be no big deal to them.. often times they post a dozen times before getting stopped... not because there is nobody watching, just because they have no problem posting and in many cases have everything ready to go so they can copy past post..... They likely would have no problem having a scripted intro post to get in the door... only to do the same thing again..

[Arabella 4]

In light of the pornographic spam that we saw in Off Topic today, I'd like to make a suggestion that all new accounts are required to post an introduction in the New Members section before they are allowed to post openly.

I was a member of another online forums group and when I tried to make a post, I received a message that I had to first make a post in the New Members thread before my account was allowed to post in the other sections.

Just a thought!

one extra post by the spammer would be no big deal to them.. often times they post a dozen times before getting stopped... not because there is nobody watching, just because they have no problem posting and in many cases have everything ready to go so they can copy past post..... They likely would have no problem having a scripted intro post to get in the door... only to do the same thing again..

Well a little prevention is better than nothing.

[rsn 135]

In light of the pornographic spam that we saw in Off Topic today, I'd like to make a suggestion that all new accounts are required to post an introduction in the New Members section before they are allowed to post openly.

I was a member of another online forums group and when I tried to make a post, I received a message that I had to first make a post in the New Members thread before my account was allowed to post in the other sections.

Just a thought!

one extra post by the spammer would be no big deal to them.. often times they post a dozen times before getting stopped... not because there is nobody watching, just because they have no problem posting and in many cases have everything ready to go so they can copy past post..... They likely would have no problem having a scripted intro post to get in the door... only to do the same thing again..

Well a little prevention is better than nothing.

The point ScottThuy made is that this doesn't prevent anything. If there was a way to prevent spam without overly burdening legitimate members, I'm sure it would already be in place. Requiring the new member to post one message in a new members thread is somewhat of a hassle for new members and does not prevent spam at all. Doing something is not always better than doing nothing. The fact is, spam will likely get through regardless of any reasonable preventative measures taken by the staff. I browse the board regularly and I'd have to say that spam posts hardly ever happen, relatively speaking, and when they do they are dealt with quickly and do not seem to have a noticable negative effect on the forums as a whole. In other words, it doesn't look like VJ has anything close to a spam problem at this point.

Edited August 23, 2009 by rsn

[Krikit 1,164]

The thing I hate about spam posts is that there are usually some really good replies which get hidden with the spam.

[ScottThuy 140]

The thing I hate about spam posts is that there are usually some really good replies which get hidden with the spam.

Good point... as offensive as the spam is, there are several here that are so quick witted that they have really entertaining responses to the OP's offense...

[Kathryn41 3,205]

I will also add that a LOT of spam posts get stopped before they ever get to the forums. Captain Ewok has also said that when the newly improved version of VJ is updated in a little while there will be some additional spam stopping devices included. In the meantime, if something does get through, don't hesitate to push the 'spam' button to the left of the post or the report button. If there is no moderator on line the spam button will arrange to stop the spammer. A moderator will then be able to remove the posts and if it hasn't happened already, close the spam account.

[Captain Ewok 1,891]

I also want to apologize for the spammers. I made the "spam report" tool (see button next to the REPORT button on the left) where if several people report a spammer their account will be suspended pending my review. Additionally, as said above, once the new forums software is stable there will be a nice new feature to help with this. It actually pre-checks new members IPs against a list of known spam IPs that other forums have detected and places them in a special "pre-approval" list that I must approve prior to them being registered. This helps with the spammers that go around to hundreds of websites posting spam.

In any case i will keep you updated on our progress to prevent spam.

[AbbynSheryl 0]

good work captain

abby n sheryl