OOAK Table Tennis Forum

There's already a facility to hold post from new members so that they need to be approved by mods, only for the first few posts. However once again, I can see that this can put off new members, espcially if they're not familiar with forums, and gte frustrated when their post does not show up...

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Does the person get a notification about that happening? I'm sure people would understand if they got a little thing telling them that it was a measure to reduce spam on the forum, and that their post will be guaranteed to appear within 12-24 hours.

Not much point posting if you are going to delay it. For example, in a thread there may be a discussion going on, I want to post a reply to something someone has said, if the mods then hold that back by 12-24hrs, the discussion could have moved on by that time and what I'd written make no sense or have no relevance anymore.

However, holding back people making new topics as their first contribution to a forum might work as no one else would know the topic exists until the mods agree it can go ahead, so in this instance it's not a problem with time delays or posts getting out of sequence or becoming irrelevant. As all the spam I've seen is started as a new topic rather than a post, I think this could work - but it would mean a lot more work for the mods. haggisv has mentioned about future forum upgrades and improved spam protection, maybe we should wait and see how that performs first. No point reinventing the wheel, if the planned forum improvements will do it for us.

That's what I was referring to anyway, Debater. Thanks for making that clear when I didn't.

Actually the pattern of posts versus topics is the other way around, IMHO. Single post spammers post most often in a new topic whereas the carpet bombing mass spammers always use existing topics already.

In other words, we would catch out a handful of spam posts by requiring approval for the first 10 posts, but the vast majority of spam would still get through.

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NITTAKU SEPTEAR cpen | FH: 729 802, 1.5, black | RPB: CORNILLEAU PILOT POWER, 2.0, red
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Catching them at registration like traditional tradesman describes is almost exactly what i do on a forum i run. The registration instructions say "ignore the captcha text and type in <answer to this question> instead." It's a small modification. I don't think you need two spaces for both black and red; you could have them type in one or the other and accept either one. Or have them type "table tennis" or "ping pong" or "whiff whaff". I haven't had any spammers at all since i changed that on my forum.

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I think that a number of the registrations humans actually do, and then get the bots to do the spamming, though, Kagin.

Yes, this is the Q&A captcha we will implement early next year. It will make a great difference to the spam volume, much like you describe, kagin.

There may still be some manually registered "sleeper" accounts that may slip through like Vinnie says. They will only be picked up when the spamming starts. We'll have to live with that, I guess. The good thing is that they will be far less than what we have to deal with now.

To cut a long story short - we are on it and will make the necessary changes early next year.

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NITTAKU SEPTEAR cpen | FH: 729 802, 1.5, black | RPB: CORNILLEAU PILOT POWER, 2.0, red
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