Suggestion: Spam prevention

[Xonok]

Basically the idea is that, since too many people don't read the rules before submitting stuff, then it would be helpful if there was some way of showing that you have read the rules or otherwise preventing spam.

Ideas I've had:
1. First post of a user must be checked by a mod or admin.
2. A tag that never shows up in posts, but is used in submissions. The existence of that tag is revealed to those that read the rules.
3. Resources not being public before approved(I don't like this one).

 

[Hawkwing]

Even if the site rules were to appear every time you clicked on a link people still wouldn't read them. People may actually be sent to that page, but they're not going to actually read the rules. There's no way to enforce that without really ruining the user's experience at the Hive.

 

[Rheiko]

most of people just skip reading the rules
for example, there is a site where you should read the rules before signing up. The site check if the rules have been scrolled down or not, if yes. allow that user to register, but instead that guy just scrolling down that rules without reading it

the point is, they are not reading the rules

 

[Xonok]

Well, I have an idea that the rules should contain something that must be added to a post.
Something that would be easy to pick up if you actually did read rules.

 

[TriggerHappy]

Just leave it to the mods to sort the threads ..

There's not much else to do without getting annoying.

 

[Hawkwing]

Forcing people to post certain things when they sign up adds a bit of a barrier to the registration process and it wouldn't be very healthy for the Hive to do anything that might threaten user activity. Undescriptive or misleading thread titles aren't too nice either, but if we are choosing between a slightly discouragement of activity and filtering through a few bad threads, I think the latter option is better.

 

[Orcnet]

I just have to agree, so leave the messy stuff to us mods. We can clean it

 

[Dr Super Good]

1. First post of a user must be checked by a mod or admin.

This was done in the past. It only resulted in daily threads of people complaining their post could not be seen. About 90% of new people left the site without posting anything as by the time their accounts were processed they decided it was not worth the wait.

2. A tag that never shows up in posts, but is used in submissions. The existence of that tag is revealed to those that read the rules.

A pretty sensible idea. Something as simple as "[RESOURCE]" could work that is randomly disclosed inside the rules page. I have seen this done on other sites with some degree of success.

3. Resources not being public before approved(I don't like this one).

Even if a resource is rubbish, as long as it is not too illegal it is no problems. Even if it is illegal, map moderators should devote their efforts removing it rather than having to moderate each map 1 by 1.

 

[Ralle]

The actual spam problem will not be solved by this. I believe that people sign up on the site and then hand over the account to a bot which spams the site. What we could do would be to prevent people from posting links as their first post or something like that.

 

[Xonok]

The actual spam problem will not be solved by this. I believe that people sign up on the site and then hand over the account to a bot which spams the site. What we could do would be to prevent people from posting links as their first post or something like that.

That would actually make a lot more sense.

 

[Ralle]

I have seen people having these sort of plugins, but I wonder how effective they are. I need to research on vBulletin spam prevention.

 

[Daffa]

A nice way is to restrict member from using URL tag [main spam bot issue] until they reach X posts. This needs to be executed carefully though.

 

[Rui]

The actual spam problem will not be solved by this. I believe that people sign up on the site and then hand over the account to a bot which spams the site. What we could do would be to prevent people from posting links as their first post or something like that.

Yes, this was my idea, but I've tinkered with it and polished it. Putting in a post count requirement will just incentive bots to post spam until they reach that post count and possibly redo all their posts or edit them to insert links. If, on one hand, people with 0 rep cannot give reputation to others and then if you need >0 rep to insert links, problem solved. I think (if new accounts give 1 rep then it's exploitable as well).

 

[Ralle]

Assuming it is a bot, maybe they won't post because each time they post one of their spammy linked posts it fails. But if there is a human behind monitoring the bot, they will manually post some linkless posts until the limit is reached.

 

[Daffa]

But if we use the rep as Rui said, we can deal with spam easily.
Make user needs X rep to use URL, but make it not too high, usually we can stop the spam bot before they make the URL on their posts.

 

[SA Dashie]

Maybe make it so they can't give out rep untill they have some themselves(if this doesn't already exist).

 

[Ralle]

I don't want rep to restrict people in any way. I don't like that.

 

[Daffa]

So, did you check for the plugin, Ralle?

 

[Ralle]

I don't see no links .