reducing spam

[Guy]

There is a lot of spam posted in this forum.

Some other forums make it so users cannot post links until they have been a member for at least a month.

If that was introduced in this forum, it would reduce spam.

[Rich]

While I agree that the spammers can be a real nuisance, the vast majority of new users are just
people with legitimate questions looking for a little help. It would be unfortunate to hamper new
users with such a knee jerk reaction just because there are a few bad apples out there. Regardless
of what you do you can't stop them. The best you can hope for is to slow them down and limit their
impact. You could limit a new user to posting in 2 or 3 threads for the first 24 hours after their first
post. That way they could not simply wait 24 hours and then spam up 15 threads. While that would
be less convenient for new users it would not lock them out. Requiring an email address and sending
a password for first time login will also help a little.

[danielibarnes]

A common pattern is for a new user to lurk as a guest for a while then register in order to post a question. If you prevent or limit that user's ability to have a conversation, even temporarily, then you have rendered the forum useless for that user. That isn't a good first impression.

As you said, we cannot stop spam. The best we can do is detect and remove it. This is why every post has a "report to moderator" link. Use it when you find spam and we can all keep the forum clean.

EDIT: Less than five minutes after I post this, a spam message gets posted. Funny.

[Guy]

More spam has been posted.

Modified:

Two different lots of spam have been posted.

There must be someone spreading the word that this forum is a soft target, as the amount of spam is continually increasing.

[gutmensch]

Ah well, it's not increasing that much... and SMF is not the safest forum software against spam by design either, but I'll do something about it.