In reaction to a fair few spam posts that have recently appeared and subsequently rapidly removed, new community forum users should have their first 10 posts audited for approval by admin prior to these posts being published to live. Maybe it's something you guys have already thought of. I'm pretty sure vBulletin supports this functionality because I've seen it in use in another vBulletin forum I'm a member of.
There are already measures in place to prevent spam. I don't want to say what those measures are, since I don't want to give our friends any insight into how to work around them. There was a flood of it today, but typically you don't see 99% of the spam posts. We have been using the vBulletin option, but as you can see, it is not a wide enough net. I have another product that I use on a different forum, and I may activate it here as well if we continue to see an inordinate amount of spam.
Fair enough, I didn't realise the problem is much worse than what is visibly apparent. What currently slips through the net is just the tip of the iceberg by the sound of it, so well done for keeping it largely spam free. I must say I've seen much worse than what's going on here..in fact complete decimation of one particular forum to the point where it became unusable and was abandoned by the users and in the end also the operator, but that was some time ago.
Yeah, there are ways to counteract every new trick they come up with, but you have to constantly tweak (we actually save all the spam posts in a hidden forum so I can go over them from time to time). I could see a forum going down in flames pretty quickly if the admins didn't stop enough of the garbage before it got in. It bothers me when one gets through. But some spam is inevitable.
A rhetorical tongue in cheek question I think - but if you really were serious, it's a subject that would need its own dedicated forum (spam free!) for discussion.
Another vBulletin forum that I manage had a comment bot attack from a single domain this morning: Most users ever online was 1,442, Today at 11:05 AM. Usually we have about 100 - 150 users online. I blocked the domain, but they threw more than 1300 concurrent connections at the forum and couldn't register one user or post one spam comment. So the methods to block automated spam are effective. The way they usually get through is generally by using humans to register and post. But we have ways of stopping most of those too.
Cool well done! I would usually have included a clapping smily here to celebrate but all of the available smilies are static. I know it's a bit of a trivial request but is there any chance we can have animated smilies please?
We kind of suffered animated smiley overload from some users in the old forum. But I'll see if we can't expand what's available.
