Spam Posts are getting annoying...

[SakuyaFM]

I've been seeing quite a lot of spam for pornographic content mostly, and it's really bad for the convention's image IMO. I think we should start restricting the first 5 posts to be moderated by the staff just like in the AX forums. It usually does filter out the spammers and keeps their posts from being displayed since it cannot be posted in the forums without moderation.

[Yuka]

Sounds like a good idea to me.

[ocean]

My suggestion would to be change your approval process. I've found that various captcha methods only work so well against spammers. I would recommend approving members manually. Moderators could take a moment to look over the account prior to approving the user, usually running a search on the registered email makes it obvious if they're a spammer, and then either approve or deny them. You would be amazed at how clean this will keep your forums.

I would also suggest browsing through your current registered members. I double checked my account after registering and noticed some members linking to things like "acai-berry-weight-loss-facts" as well as some other spam like URLs.

Just my $0.02.

[Ryan Layton]

Our current method is to manually approve a new poster's first 3 posts. This seems to work fairly well, as most spammers posts are at minimum, wildly off-topic. It sometimes means that new posts by new posters get delayed a while if mods get too busy to approve posts, but it keeps pretty much all the spam from getting through.

I know that the member list is full of bots and would-be spammers. I need to go through the lists and deactivate those accounts that are clearly bots and spammers, but as you might imagine, we've been a bit busy in the past month.

[Reaver]

I actually deleted a bunch of obvious bots, spammers, crawlers, spiders, you name it yesterday. I'm sure I didnt get all of them, but one way of cleaning users is also to delete any member accounts with 0 posts if they have not posted in a month.

[Ryan Layton]

I actually deleted a bunch of obvious bots, spammers, crawlers, spiders, you name it yesterday. I'm sure I didnt get all of them, but one way of cleaning users is also to delete any member accounts with 0 posts if they have not posted in a month.

I actually do that every once and a while, but exclude people that have signed up in the past month or so to give people who have joined the forums for legit reasons who haven't posted yet a chance to do so. I also exclude people that I specifically know who they are. I haven't run that cleanup in a couple months but I'm planning to do so once I deal with other more pressing post-con business.

[Reaver]

Roger Roger, we should try to keep up on it and do cleaning at least once a month. I did change one setting in administration to prevent all bots, spiders, and crawlers, so that should help. Theres gotta be some other settings we can mess with to avoid getting bots/crawlers too.