Spam filter

[Broken Stylus]

Maybe a captcha should be added to first timers' posts after their registration? The captcha would only be lifted after, say, 10 or 20 posts?

[Fat Pug Studio]

Yeah, i'm reporting everything i can, but there's really a lot coming through.

[Lane]

We currently use all of the available security/anti-spam features available. Additional mods are available for SMF, but require setup. We can look into them. The current implementation actually subdues a HUGE amount of spam. The ones getting through are the 1%.

I changed some of the settings but don't want to increase the Captcha difficulty since it starts to become very difficult to read for a human. The bots getting through are actually just fairly robust spam bots and possibly getting human support, they pass email verification and verification for their first 5 posts as well as clear the registration questions and captchas. Many of them are legit posts which are later edited with spam.

[djaydino]

Hi.
yea I'm checking/removing them almost daily.

The thing is some are not bots but real people doing this.

They usually copy some posts and then after x time come back and edit the post adding ads.
So if i see suspicious post i copy a part of the text and use search.
most of the times i find a duplicate of what they posted.

[Broken Stylus]

There's little one can do against sweatshop meatbags aside from making their operations much more tedious and slow.

Post-edits can be easily be forbidden for newcomers. This way, only confirmed and therefore safe posters should have the privilege of being allowed to edit their posts at a later date.

What defines a safe poster? It should be both a matter of time and quantity of posts. The former parameter would certainly avoid a newcomer to spam seemingly unobtrusive posts only to increase his post count.

Captchas would be reduced or lifted for safe posters.

This shall add an extra layer of filtering and would make fairly obvious the posters who seem to type in nonsense or barely useful posts; I saw some of that type lately, they're mostly "supportive" posts like "great!", "me too!", "very useful thx" and similar crap.

@Djaydino
Are you officially attached to the Playmaker staff?

[Lane]

That's not a bad idea. We'd have to add a new user group definition in order to support doing that. Maybe after we see if the existing changes slow it down any.