Post Approval in the OT Forum

[Arani]

These people are smart... what ever happens if they're determined enough they'll just keep coming back with new accounts. I think that there should be some kind of special check or some type of good question before an account is made... I think that's probably the best chance. Yes, they'll most likely get past it, but in my experiences it can get had to stop a determined spammer. Unless there's a way for the spam stuff to get deleted by the computer if it's caught or something I'm not sure there's anything that can stop them... only stuff to slow them down. They don't care if they get banned, again, they'll keep coming if they want to. And if post approval is put in it might pile up to be a lot of work for the mods. I mean they're the ones that approve this stuff, correct?

So ya just a thought.

Edit: The humans are more of a problem than the bots. Bots are just a computer... there's almost always a way to stop a computer. A human though.... not so much.

[Moka]

Well it's very tough for computers to tell if the other computer is on a proxy. I won't get into technical details.

Plus, some users' ISPs use proxies by default, such as AOL. So I don't think it's fair to ban all new members using a proxy, just those that spam.

With each ban, our ban list gets a bit stronger, but I wouldn't count on spambots giving up. I mean, there are over 12,000,000 IP address combinations.

[Arani]

True. Any ideas for some kind of automatic spammer check or something, bc it really is getting annoying.

[Moka]

It's a constant battle between the spambot programmers and the spambot countermeasure programmers. Right now, the latter are losing. Most of the time they can keep ahead of them though.

So until an update to the spambot countermeasures comes out, we'll just have to keep ahead of them a little bit ourselves. When I get back in a few days I'll work on this a bit.

[SnowyCheetah]

Moka, you're probably gonna be like "lol..." when I say this but I think the current circumstances warrant more staff members. I'll return to my moderator position if you would allow it and wish for it *cough* but in any case you probably should promote one or two more staff members, because not only is advertising spam becoming more common but the trolling kind as well.

[Moka]

It's definitely something to consider... KK says staff are swamped with this spam.

[FlipMode]

[quote="Moka"]It's definitely something to consider... KK says staff are swamped with this spam.[/quote]

Well lets just say; almost every time I have logged on over the past few days there has been at least one spam topic on the main page and yesterday nearly every forum was showing a spam thread as the latest posts >.>. Perhaps one or two more staff members could be a good thing to at least get rid of it quicker, maybe you could even have a new category of staff members who are dedicated to that purpose, and they would be the most active members and are therefore most likely to see it?

[Arani]

Agreed. New staff members to help even out the work, maybe one or two people dedicated to the places that are being spammed the most, like the OT Fictions forum.