Posts of links from new members
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| A better human verification system would be helpful |
IF the site owner wants to take the time to implement it.
No matter what "the system" is, it will require the Admin to agree to do the work. That isn't likely to happen.
I would be ok with a moronic filter that culls anyone with less than 20 posts that puts more than 3 links in a post. The majority of the low hanging fruit are those dumb 'watch sports or whatever' with 50 links and nothing else in the posts. The gibberish ones with a link in the profile are much more subtle, as are the 1 link gibberish ones. It would take too much work to catch those -- and spammers can figure out and defeat such logic with small changes that make big work on the filter side, its a losing battle.
| I would be ok with a moronic filter that culls anyone with less than 20 posts that puts more than 3 links in a post. |
I tend to agree, assuming we rate-limit the number of posts/hour such that someone can't post a whole bunch of "yes, I agree" messages to random threads and then post the spam before they can get reported. We could alternatively use a more involved metric for how to gauge a "new" account. A rough idea I came up with earlier was to maintain a counter that roughly gauges how many hour intervals an account was active during. The system would keep track of the last hour that a poster posted at, and increment the counter every time that last hour variable changes. We could then say an account ceases to be "new" after some number of those hours of activity.
That said, there should probably also be a more stringent limit on how many threads n one can make per m hours. That would actually have a double benefit: it would stop newbies from multi-posting their questions to every relevant subforum before we have a chance to answer, and it would stop spammers from making the first thread of each subforum a spam message. I'm not quite sure of the values of n and m, but I'm tempted to say 1 thread every 4 hours. The main downside (that I can think of) would be that it would take longer for spam accounts to be banned, since they can't dump all their spam at once and have it be filtered all at once.
Thoughts? Sure, it's a pointless discussion, but aren't most discussions?
-Albatross
| it's a pointless discussion |
I don't see this as pointless, I see it as moot.
No matter what, if the site's owner doesn't want nor care to change how the site is managed then nothing anyone suggests matters.
His "dime," his call.
Eh, the system we've got seems to be working fine. Spam posts rarely hang around for more than a few minutes. It's trivially easy for any one of us to hit the "Report" button, nuke the post, and carry on with our day.
| the domain is up for renewal in January |
Now THAT ^^^ is neither pointless nor trivial. CPlusPlus might soon join countless other sites into the trash heap of formerly great websites that simply go dark and forever more no more.
The loss of a noob-friendly programming forum is not insignificant. Stackoverflow is too harsh and overly-strict IMO. Doesn't make for a great resource to ask beginners' questions.
Don’t become alarmist.
Maintaining a domain is cheap, and whatever else it does for twicker, cplusplus.com at least produces some ad income.
I think it unlikely to disappear any time soon.
Maintaining a domain is cheap, and whatever else it does for twicker, cplusplus.com at least produces some ad income.
I think it unlikely to disappear any time soon.
I will be alarmist if'n I wants to be, dammit!
*NYAH! :Þ
No matter what, it ain't up to us users.
*NYAH! :Þ
No matter what, it ain't up to us users.
I look at the spammers doing their link tango dance here, and I wonder if they really get a return on their investment of time and effort.
I doubt it.
I doubt it.
The only bad aspect IMO of letting spammers freely register here is they remove so many different nicks from the pool, someone legitimate tries to register here with an already spammed nick and they can't.
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