A possible solution to forum spam?

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

I have found a possible solution for our manual forum spam problem: we disallow posts with URLs in them if you have less than a few posts. I found this idea in this post on a forum administrator's forum.

Implementing this should be pretty easy and since it appears that new users rarely post links, I think this solution would rarely be noticed by our users but spammers would definitely notice it.

Anyone think this is a bad idea? If not, I will try to implement it.

Patrick

James3359 · Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 11:48 am Post subject:

Seems good to me. Very Happy

ovvldc · Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 3:56 pm Post subject:

Very good plan. I doubt we will see people hanging around for five or ten posts, just to get a chance to pitch their link.

Best wishes,
Oscar

James3359 · Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2009 2:23 am Post subject:

Patrick, just a further thought on this. We've seen one or two cases where we've had two or three posts together from a spammer - and I just wondered whether that is as a result of boards operating this sort of policy. If so it might lead to more rather than fewer spam posts. Has that possibility been canvassed on the admin boards that you frequent?

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

There has been no discussion of that. In fact, the proposed solution is not really discussed much as most sites seem to still be trying to stop automated spam which we eliminated years ago using the CAPTCHA as part of the login process.

The key part of the proposal is that the post fails if you have any links in the post. The theory here is that spammers will usually give up after they can't post the content that they get rewarded to post and they will move on in searc of easier places to post.

Patrick

Lorinda · Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2009 9:29 am Post subject:

It seems to me that WordReference forums has had this kind of policy in place, although I couldn't find mention of it when I went looking. And OOo Community Forums has been discussing adding it as well.

I think it makes good sense.

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

FYI. I hacked in this new feature this morning. I look for "://" in either your post message or your signature and if you have very few posts you will get the following message. If anyone translate this message, I will add it to the Trinity code:

pluby · The Architect Joined: Jun 16, 2003 Posts: 11949

FYI. Today I enhanced the logic so that instead of blindly looking for "://" in the post or signature, I use the same logic that the Trinity code uses to detect URLs in posts. Hopefully, this new code will more reliably detect URLs in posts than the code I used yesterday.

Patrick