Please don’t block gmail. I use my gmail account for forums 
Not all forums are trustworthy!
Yes, but anything that takes an extra step of time and effort and slows their connection is worthwhile. If the site recorded location of all posts deleted, it would be interesting to see what the ratio of nonsense to real posts is for many countries.
The country can be another factor (along with many others e.g does post contain link, how many user posts, email address vendor, post length,user posts deleted) that can contribute to a scoring system used in a moderation queue filter. These posts would still be visible to the logged in user that made them so they aren’t immediately aware their post has been filtered to make it harder for users to react against the filter.
Sure. I’d have no problem with that. I don’t live in Michigan either.
It’s not the WORLD WIDE WEB if you start banning countries.
Liking this
I’m also liking this idea.
We have lots of the too kinds. Humans don’t read the rules so they don’t care if their posts are removed or not. Bots, of course, are even more annoying for the amount of posts they get to post but sometimes they’re smarter than that… right now, we have a list of 3520 members that we need to confirm if they’re real or bots…
Regarding your question, I don’t know if a post written in less than 5 secs can go into the moderation queue. Right now, the moderation queue filters certain terms used by spammers, or any post that need to be previously checked for certain conditions.
thanks
the best part is, we already have a full staff of mentors, whose job is to, um, mentor the members, and who, in doing so, are required to read and monitor all new posts in their areas, so they are the ones best suited to making the decision to allow good members to have signatures
I think r937’s idea (along with my own =p).
We don’t want to punish all new people outright for something because there are a lot of people that have been doing this stuff for years that just happen upon this site.
When I joined years ago I definitely wasn’t as experienced as I am now, but I did have a few good things to say here and there. If I couldn’t have said them because I was “new”, I probably wouldn’t still be here.
Thanks guys, lots of valuable stuff has come out of this thread. I appreciate you taking the time.
Banning an entire country’s IP address might work but would the same country be banned from the sitepoint marketplace too ??
Just kidding !
Spam is an ever present danger. It reminds me of a story.
An insect came into a man’s house. So the man sprayed lots of insecticides and pesticides into his house. Still he couldn’t stop the insects. Now he went to his garden and found the source of the insects, so he cut down all the trees which seemed to contain these insects. No it didn’t work either. And the final solution …burn down the house.
The forum is for all of us discussing and enjoying issues which are present all over the world. The internet has demolished all barriers among all countries enabling free flow of information. And yes SPAMMERS are *****ds but should we burn our own house due this ? Lets find other intelligent ways to tackle the problem.
And BTW does google really care about links from forums nowadays so why this noise about signatures ?? beats me
“A blanket ban of all IP addresses from problem areas (like India)”
Not Good, everybody is not a spammer!
no, google doesn’t, but this message hasn’t gotten through to the numpties who are doing the spamming
99% of spam comes from already documented IP addresses and e-mails… are you running any sort of forum spam blocking like say:
After a forums I maintain was recently hacked (No shame to it getting hacked, after surviving around 2K brute force attempts a DAY for six years – seems to be a high priority target) we went to relaunch, and I wanted something a bit more robust to take the load off our moderators. It’s a fairly high traffic forums, though not quite the size of here. to put it in perspective:
Relaunch clean, fresh copy of SMF – Jan 22
Member joins since: 2,169
Posts Since: 58K~
Member joins rejected by “Stop Spammer” plugin (which uses stopforumspam.com): 33,943
33,000 attempts to join that are all a nasty case of ‘obvious spam is obvious’. In the month and a half or so since the new version went live, we’ve had exactly ONE spammer get past it, and I caught THREE false positives.
Mind you the forum in question is on SMF, but the plugins page does say they have one for vBull:
Stop Forum Spam - Contributions
Though the mod seeing updates is vBull 4+ only, the one for 3.x from what I hear doesn’t NEED new updates. (Once something works, why mess with it?)
I HIGHLY recommend implementing it if you haven’t already, and honestly I think it would let you skip the rest of the stuff you’re looking at doing as a waste of time.
– edit – just don’t enable “block by username”, it’s useless banning even simple names like “peter”. Just enable e-mail and IP addy checking, and poof – end of problem.
… and be sure to check the approval list for false positives, reject, notify on the ones you’re 100% sure of to increase the ‘level’ of ban on SFS, and if one slips through the cracks, REPORT it so it helps everyone else using the system.
If SitePoint chooses to IP-block entire countries, I will hand in my Mentor badge and probably resign as a member as well.
Discrimination over things people cannot change about themselves (like their skin colour, or what country they live in) irks me, because it’s blatantly Wrong with a W.
I have little to say about automated systems, except that they always seem to hit me. Another forum I was once quite active on had a large change and added something called “Mollum”. That steaming pile of garbage was brown and stinky, blocked accounts randomly, added a bazillion captchas that WebVisum couldn’t solve to everything, and now I rarely post over there (it’s a good forum though). Garbage software with strange complex algorithms nobody understands guarantees people who’ve done no wrong get sucked up into it and mods will waste time trying to figure out what obscure whatever triggered the defective immune response. It’s like giving your forum lupus.
The best way to do it is to make every user to have a signature but i don’t understand why spammers are postings spams on site point. I Personally believe signatures must be everyone to prevent spammers using the site point in a bad way.
Edit:
Link changed by Spike to remove the obvious spam link drop.
But I will leave the post here as a reminder of what we are up against…
How incredibly stupid are spammers? answer see above 
I think your mentor badge is safe Stomme, I am pretty sure that IP block would be unjustified and not happen.
I hardly think blocking an IP range for India can be qualified as “DISCRIMINATION” against all Indians. While certainly it affects those who are not spammers, I don’t think anyone is claiming that all Indians are spammers - just that enough Indians are spammers that it affects interaction with the region.
As a metaphor… would you take a leisurely stroll through the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungles of Colombia? No. Not because you believe all Afghanis are terrorists or all Colombians are guerrillas, but because there is enough of a presence in those regions to make you apply special consideration.
Stating that “India is not a problem area for spammers” is politically-correct bull, to the degree of being delusional.
I wrote a vbulletin plugin many moons ago for 3.5 that employed bayesian filtering to stop spam, and it was quite effective. I imagine it still would be. If I was going to expand on it I’d add a spam button for users to click. When enough users hit the spam button spam goes away. Users are tracked for accuracy in this system - if they mark as spam a post that isn’t spam the system silently removes their privileges to can the spam. Once a user has demonstrated they accurately report spam their single report can destroy the spam.
Everyone starts with a score of 1. When the moderator confirms a report they made as indeed spam their score goes up by one. It takes 10 points worth of user complaints to can spam and, yes, users can individually have 10 point scores. If a moderator has to unmark spam all users that marked it have their spam read score set to -10, so they have to build their score back up with accurate reporting. If a moderator feels someone is gaming the system to mark posts that shouldn’t be marked they can be banned from it.
As to the bayesian filters, those worked by giving each incoming post a spam score based on factors characteristic of spam.
- First Post
- Post has a link
- Post has multiple links
- Post has a URL from a known spam domain.
- Post is short
- Post has more link than unlinked
- Post all linked.
And so on. The system learns by storing the URL’s that the spammer linked to. At the end of the day the spammer can’t get away from the fact they have to point to somewhere. This learning process can be used on its own or supplemented by a common pool such as stop forum spam.
Another key part of my approach was that spammers aren’t banned - they are sent to global ignore using vBulletin’s Tachy-goes-to-coventry feature. This allows the spammer to continue “posting” - often betraying his other links and teaching the system how to block his crap should he ever wise up and switch accounts.
Finally, some heurestics might help. I supplemented the above by using a plug in to simply time user registration. Spam bots know the post format of vbulletin and can fill out a response in less than a second. The server can time the quickness by which the account was created - and especially detect when a spammer tries to post in an account without even being sent the form! In these cases again, the system lets the bot make the account, immediately sends it to coventry and then proceeds to learn from the bot the characteristics of its spam.