An idea to stem the tide of spam?

[nowhere.elysium]

Korn - I don't know if the idea's been mooted before or not, but would it be worth setting a 'cooling-off' period between signing up to the site, and being able to post for the first time? Kinda like B3ta's Newbie Tuesday thing.

I only ask because it seems that an ever-increasing percentage of the content on here has been tainted by that particular spammer with the broken .gif, and being forced to wait a few days might make the spammer lose interest? It'll also help to highlight bots a bit more readily as well, I'd have thought.
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'10 SV650SF, '83 GS650GT (it lives!), Questionable DIY dash project, 3D Printer project, Lasercutter project

[Rogerborg]

IMO, that punishes and deters real live humans in order to mildly inconvenience scripts or paid astroturfers who won't really care.

We already have a user moderation system which seems to work well enough. Too many spam ratings on your first post = autoban would likely cover most genuine spammers, although it would catch a few suspicious looking innocents out as well. They can always sign up again and have another go, with no more inconvenience than if they had to wait before posting in the first place.
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Biking is 1/20th as dangerous as horse riding.
GONE: HN125-8, LF-250B, GPz 305, GPZ 500S, Burgman 400 // RIDING: F650GS (800 twin), Royal Enfield Bullet Electra 500 AVL, Ninja 250R because racebike

[Alpha-9]

Is there no captcha on registration?

It's fairly standard practice and genuine members only have to do it once when signing up so wouldn't be inconvenient. Unless you already have it and it doesnt work as they recognise the captchas or something, or manually do them

I've had software that could recognise crap captchas actually
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Fzr-600 1999

[doggone]

I help run a similarly busy forum and the first 10 or so posts have to be manually approved by moderators.
It ticks off some new members and they'll do duplicates when it doesn't show on the board - also creates a bit more work for mods but finding all the spam posts is quite a task too.

Without going into detail there are ways to hack into forums by posting certain code - then change things or download everyones emails.
They can even lock out the owner by changing passwords.
If people can join and post immediately you lost a line of defence against this.

[Korn]

[CaNsA]

How about restricting new users to one section of the forum for 48hrs

They can view everything, but can only post in a "BCF Lobby" for those 48hrs.

[Derivative]

Spammers aren't going to care one jot whether or not they have to sign up and then post slightly later.

Two reasons:

1) mainly done by bots anyway, they register to any forum possible and post wherever they can

2) why would a human spammer get 'bored'? It's their job...

[doggone]

[Kickstart]

Hi

For most boards just making the registration page slightly non standard will stop almost all spammers, as almost all are bots. However BCF is quite possibly big enough for a fair number of people to be registering as spammers.

[Rogerborg]

Kudos to the mods for cleaning up, but we're now starting each day with threads that have multiple spam "last posts" in them. When the quote-bots start quoting each other, would that be the time to take some more action?
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Biking is 1/20th as dangerous as horse riding.
GONE: HN125-8, LF-250B, GPz 305, GPZ 500S, Burgman 400 // RIDING: F650GS (800 twin), Royal Enfield Bullet Electra 500 AVL, Ninja 250R because racebike

[Korn]

Most of these are people who search Google for their chosen keywords and try to spam their links into any forum topics that happen to come up. Contrary to popular belief this kind of spam isn't automated, it's far more effective to pay somebody in India/China/etc pennies a month to sit there and do it.

There is already a good CAPTCHA image in the registration form, and BCF's reg form is non-standard from the usual phpBB form. Making these harder to read/complete wouldn't solve anything... human spammers can read and the bots are already hitting a brick wall.

Adding a few questions to the form that only 'real bikers' could answer is all well and good, but not only could these be Googled by a determined spammer but they might deter somebody from registering to get advice on their CBT, for example. Did you know the cylinder arrangement of a BMW R90 when you first started biking?

Approval for all new users' first x posts adds a much higher workload on the mods than nuking a few spam accounts does, as 90% of new accounts aren't spammers. If the problem gets much worst this is the most likely solution, alongside some kind of system to only require approval for dodgy-looking posts.

Please use the spam ratings when you see spam, that's what it's there for and not only does it make it easier for the mods to find/nuke these accounts but it hides the spam in the meantime.

Do not quote the spam or reply saying 'OMG YOU DRAGGED UP A 10 YEAR OLD THREAD LOLOLOLOL', you'll only look like an idiot when the spam is removed and it's your post that is first past the cobweb marker.

If you see some old spam lying around that wasn't removed and you haven't rated it, go spam rate it, it will eventually get cleaned up either by a mod or one of the automated maintenance scripts.
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3516 Miles, 11 Countries

[The Shaggy D.A.]

[Alpha-9]

Spam rating is great till you run out of karma, you should be able to rate things as spam regardless.
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Fzr-600 1999

[Rogerborg]

[Korn]

[Rogerborg]