Forced Introductions to Prevent Spammers

Community
1

I had a little bit of a think about cracking down on spammers on the SP Forums and I had a little thought.

What if we introduced forced introductions in the Introductions forum?

What I mean exactly is that when somebody registers for a SP Forums account and they’ve confirmed their registration through E-Mail they still won’t be able to post any new threads or posts. They’ll be forced to post a new thread in the Introductions forum and this is the only place, besides the SitePoint Support and Feedback forum and sub-forums that they’ll be able to post a new thread in. The original post itself must contain at least x amount of words for the thread to be valid and posted and then after they’ve hit “Submit New Thread” all other posting rights will be enabled.

It’s a bit like the Website Reviews forum whereby people have to submit 3 reviews before they can have their own Website reviewed in their own thread. We’ll crack down on the moderation of the Introductions forum to make the introductions themselves much better, instead of:

“im here to learn from everyone, please. thank you all very much. hope to see you around.”

And in addition to the Introduction threads being of a much higher quality, we’ll also be preventing a lot of spammers on the forums too.

Or is there a forum posting bot out there that is intelligent enough to figure out that they’ll have to post a thread in the Introductions forum first before they can spam the rest of the boards…?

Just an idea. I think it might work out pretty well. And even if it doesn’t have a big impact, it’s an extra layer of protection against the spammers at least.

Andrew Cooper

2

This will help you against auto-bots, but not the dissepticons…errrrr… the manual attacks. What if somebody programs a bot just for this purpose? But yeah, if you make sure that only meaningful and complete introductions are posted every time, then this will work out to be a great, if not perfect, countermeasure. Get ready to recruit more mods though, that would be a heap of extra work :slight_smile:

3

I agree with you completely, but I think that if such actions were implemented and the workload was shared evenly for the Introductions forum then it could be a great, if not perfect, countermeasure, as you’ve just said. It’s an idea at least…Well, I got the idea from another forum actually and they keep on top of their Introductions forum and they don’t have many problems with spammers and fluff, it’s a much much much smaller forum than the SP Community Forums and so it is very different from our situation, but I think with some work that it could work out to be good. Nothing bad could come from it, could it?..Aside from more work for the Advisors / Team Leaders…:frowning:

Any thoughts from HAWK, the Team Leaders, or Advisors on this idea?

Andrew Cooper