Anti-Spam/New Sign Up

[swood]

Hey all
I'm new to this forum and i'm sure this topic has been brought up before, but i think it is important and probably turning away future active members.

This post is just my opinion on some changes i feel could improve the activity slightly. I know some might not agree and that's fine, but i'd just like my chance to be heard

I use to run my own general forum which had just over 15,000 posts, so i know how annoying spam can be.

The main problem i had with the registration process here is the approval waiting time. I'm not saying staff aren't doing there job properly, far from it and i don't want to seem like a d*** (is swearing allowed on this forum?). But usually when a member has to wait to be approved they will leave and either not return on purpose or forget to return. The following are methods are ways i believe could change this:
~Don't allow links until a member has 5 posts.
~Have a registration team. You may not want to hire a load of staff that you don't really trust, why not hire a registration team. I've seen this kind of method on other forums and it works well. A couple of normal members are given a new rank which gives them all the permissions of a normal member but with the additional permission of being able to approve new members.

At the very least, i think an email should be sent out notifying a member when they have been approved. This could draw back members that have left on purpose or forgotten to return

I'd love to here what everyone else thinks on the matter.

Thank you
swood

[Ben]

Hi again swood. Unfortunately the forum attracts an enormous amount of spam and the strict approach we're currently using is the only thing that's worked. I've run many forums over the last 12 years and I've never seen anything like it. It's insane. Before we implemented the current setup, on a bad day we'd get 50-100 spammy posts. We were fighting a losing battle.

On the offchance, I happened to enable forum moderation and discovered we were getting 100-200 signups per day. 99% of these are spam. Even if we prevent people from doing anything before we approve their account, it's simply too much work to pick out maybe 2 or 3 real accounts from 100-200 new accounts created every day. There simply isn't anything consistent about most of the accounts - a few use the same email provider, some use the same IP, but a huge chunk of members are just random. That's what I meant about vBulletin - it's so familiar to spammers, there must be hundreds of scripts purely designed to flood forums in this way.

Not allowing links is something we did do prior to the current changes. I think it was a 10 or 15 post limit before you could post links. To counter this, the spammers did one of two things. Firstly, they would simply flood the forum with junk posts (literally, meaningless nonsense) until they had enough posts to spam, then they spammed us anyway. It actually made the problem worse. The other thing they would do is attempt to post a link anyway, which didn't always work but it didn't take too much effort to try and post a link. It wasn't clickable - but you could still read the link. Which isn't terrible, but it didn't really solve the problem.

We have asked many times for new forum staff, and it's extremely rare for anyone to take us up on the offer. I left this forum for about a year (I don't own it - I'm just helping out) and in that time, maybe two new staffers joined the team. And when I dug around the larger forums, the spam was out of control. The staff who do still help out here check in when they can, but to my knowledge most of the team don't have a huge amount of time to spare. We simply don't have enough time between us to keep things clean without adopting a very strict approach to new members joining.

I do think you make a good point about notifying a member when they have been approved though, as this would be a good way to remind people to come back and visit us.

[swood]

Ok that's fair enough. If you need an extra pair of hands around this forum, i wouldn't mind putting my name forward. I've owned, administrated and moderated many forums, i can present my experience if need be.

Its a shame this forum isn't more active. It's such a great resource for blog owners. I'll try my best to bring new members

[rjleaman]

Yes, the notification about approval is a good idea... I'd second that, @swood.

I also totally agree with Ben - really, Bloggeries just can't afford to relax its entry requirements: Humans, even a team of humans, are just not able to keep up with bots. It's a forum-killer. Better to have a lower level of participation and a higher quality of participants, I believe, than to lose the real people in a flood of spam and simultaneously burn out the moderators.

[QuirkyJessi]

Originally Posted by rjleaman

simultaneously burn out the moderators.

Who me? Burned out? No way!! *crashes and explodes into the most beautiful pile of flames*



But yes, every new member having to wait on an approval kind of sucks, but before we put it in place, I was spending many, many hours here every week, just clearing spam. I would wake up in the morning, clear out all the email notifications fussing about spam, then go on a clearing spree within the forums of stuff that wasn't reported......some days, I would rinse and repeat this more times than I will admit to.

For the longest while, I didn't really mind, because I love it here and it came in waves, so it wasn't always too bad. I rarely even post here any more because so much time was spent dealing with spam....or people complaining about spam (which isn't good!). This isn't my site. I don't get paid to be here. So yeah, I hate that people have to wait on approvals (and to be honest, I hate doing approvals :P), but it sure beats what it was just a few months ago.

[corporationwiki]

Just throwing my two cents in here. I certainly wish there was a better way to "authenticate" people. I'm just trying to get to 15 posts so I can get my blog reviewed. In fact, this post is #9. Maybe I'll post a follow up?

[Graefyl]

To be honest, when I first came here, after being on programming forums, I thought screw you people, then as I went through the bulletin board, I realized what is happening here.

This forum is big, in that it attracts huge amounts of bloggers, so figure for every 20-30 good un's, you get a spammer. That is a very high count, but being what this is I am not surprised if it is close to that figure.

By having the 15 post limit, Ben is assuring that the rest of us can get fairly high quality posters. So that amount sounds good. Even then they get thru sometimes as I've just seen in the entrance hall (at least I think it's spam, or a Vietnamese person who has a lot to say and it didn't translate right)