Spam Help

[PaulH]

HI all,

We have a crack team of forum Ninjas dedicated 24/7 to preventing people from trying to sell you Louis Vitton luggage and masculine enlargement on the forum. And by crack team I mean Citroen and me. And by 24/7 I mean whenever we happen to remember. But when I say Ninjas I do mean Ninjas. To help us out here are a couple of ideas:

1. If you see a spam flag it - there's a little exclamation button at the top right of each post to do this. We do generally notice spam, but we're very slightly less than perfect, especially if the spam is embedded in a long thread.

2. Don't reply to the spam - if you do this we're less likely to notice the spam, because it looks more like a normal thread, and when we do it takes us longer to delete the entire thread rather than just deleting the spammer's post(s).

With your help we can once again make Gotham a city to be proud of. Thanks!

[jvincent]

Good post.

I'm a ninja (mod) on a different forum and we have it set up so that any posts from new users (less than 5 posts) that contain a link are placed under moderation by default and don't show up unless approved by a mod.

It's a nice way to collect all the spammers in a mod visible only spot for easy banning.

That forum uses vBulletin, so I'm not sure if phpBB supports the feature or not.

[PaulH]

Unfortunately we already have whatever settings phpBB allows for new users set pretty restrictively; what spam gets through is close to unavoidable, at least without adding in mods to the code that can be problematic on their own. Thanks for the suggestion though, it did prompt me to have another look which is no bad thing!

[Bob S.]

1. If you see a spam flag it - there's a little exclamation button at the top right of each post to do this. We do generally notice spam, but we're very slightly less than perfect, especially if the spam is embedded in a long thread.

Thanks for the tip Paul. It just never occurred to me that it had that function.

Bob S.

[PaulH]

No problem Bob, it's not particularly obvious is it? And thanks for your contribution to the forum!