Don't allow new members to post links

Given the porn attack today (was it Adam Thornton :stuck_out_tongue:), it might be a good idea to prevent new members from posting links. There ought to be some mod for it if phpBB doesn’t support this natively.

Links or images… this spam is really getting out of hand. Random nonsense is ok, as long as it’s deleted, but today’s spam is seriously not cool.

Yeah, I really don’t expect this forum to have NSFW content, so it would be great if there were a way to make that not happen…

Over on the ADRIFT forum, the first post by any new poster has to be approved by a moderator. Could the same sort of thing be done here?

A program designed to scan the forum for the afoementioned NSFW content could probably remove it almost instantaneously.

The problem with this is that a legitimate user could be waiting quite a while for their first post to be publically displayed if there aren’t that many active moderators about. A programmatic filter would probably be a better bet.

That sounds harder to implement than something which merely hides images (perhaps behind a fold like how the “spoiler” and “rant” boxes work) from anyone with fewer than, I dunno, twenty posts.

Considering how seldom people actually need to post images on here, I would make it so you had to have say 50 posts before you could post images at all, plus I would incorporate a 20 post per day limit on new members so I bot couldn’t spam past that limitation. If a new member tried to exceed that limit I would auto IP ban them.

Actually, I rather meant scan the posts for excessive use of imagery (a usual post here rarely has more than 3-4 images) as well as text with cladestine vocabulary and links to dark sites (these tend to use cladestine vocabulary). Plus, we would be making the day of the programmer who makes such a program.

There are phpbb mods for Akismet and Project Honeypot.

We can change the security questions that are used when signing up. Make them harder, maybe. But that would only help if the spammers are bots, and I think that’s not always the case. I could try turning on CAPTCHA but if I remember right, there was some issue with my Linux being outdated and there were issues installing some GDI module needed for that.

I strongly recommend turning on capcha, it solved all these issues on a phpBB forum i run. :slight_smile:

Hasn’t the problem been solved already? I haven’t seen any spam at all since the first-post-approval rule was put in place.

I don’t think that this rule is an ideal solution, because throwing roadblocks in front of new users is never ideal. However, it seems to be as good as we’ve gotten.

(Captcha is a good filter, but it has not eliminated spam on the blog where I post. Dedicated spammers can get past it, either with automated tools or by hiring cheap Internet eyeballs.)