VCCA Home Forums GENERAL DISCUSSION General Discussions spammers posting on here

I think its time that all new members FIRST POST be monitored and approved before being submitted as a way to eliminate these people from posting their stupid nonsense.

Many model rail road groups on yahoo used this system to keep their sites clean of trol vermin.

mike lynch

A lot of forums have it in the rules, and are right out rude to you if your first post isn't in the newbie thread. Now I understand why. One thing I noticed here is that the spammers profile has not been deleted. One of the two yesterday had his thread shut down, but he still has a link to his crap posted in his profile...

The board I'm a mod on uses that procedure. A new user's first post isn't visible to anyone other than the mod in that forum and the webmaster until the mod approves it. If the mod's on vacation the webmaster can approve it as well. It's a pretty good way to stop the general user from having to wade through the spam.

why can't the moderators or the administrator simply delete the spammers posts? i'm sure they have the magic button to do so.

Well the administrator and his moderators are busy people and if they have to go thru every post to keep a sembalance of order to this place, it becomes a time consuming , payless job. ???

Go ahead and ask him how much time he spends daily to weekly reading the posts and tossing spammers out. Would you like to take on this time consuming thankless job ???

The simplest system is what i proposed in the first post on this thread. Your first post doesn't get posted until approved by the moderator. Mod reads post says spamm and bans and deletes said spammer from site. No harm done , no foul done to the happy inhabitants of said site.

He also doesn't get his EMAIL bombed with furious inhabitants yelling SPAMMMMMMMMER on board, call out the hounds. !!!!!!!!!

mike lynch

Thanks for your comments... I've been following them... wanted to let you know that I saw them.

In parallel I've been holding a "private" conversation with all of the Moderators on the same topic.

For reference, I don't have a feature that allows me to suspend first-timer posts until they've been reviewed... It sounds like a good feature -- and I wish that we had it -- but we don't.

With the Moderators, we've discussed a couple of other possible solutions -- but unfortunately none of them really are that clean and efficient. Since we average over 70 new Chat folks registering each month, holding up their registrations, or reviewing their first post would be a lot of ADDITIONAL work for "someone"....

New topic... yes I can delete SPAMMERS profiles... I just forgot on the last two guys. Normally I don't want ANY remaining links left... BUT I purposely left their empty postings just to show folks what we do with these buggers. Not right or wrong... just a difference in style.

Thanks again.

--Bill

Oh, wouldn't that make for some "happy campers"...I think "newbie's" trying to get a simple question answered would come to the conclusion that this is some sort of private club for members only and just say frick this place...

If the spammers really want to invade the forum they might present a first, "innocent" question about anything in the motor hobby. After approval they can hit hard the second time, but not again. I have seen such attempts.

BBB has asked us not to delete the IP-adress before he has notified and banned it.

When I visit our forum I often start with checking all newbie names by Googling. If they also have been recently on many other different forums, often with a wide range of subjects, I get a feeling of the user being a spammer and preparing for a later attack.

We only have some very few on our site. And the few are staying for only hours or minutes due to the mixture of an open eye from users "all over the world" 24/7.

The board I'm a mod for uses the same forum software that we do here on Chat. Our board is set up to restrict first time users until the mod of whatever forum they first post in approves the post. Once approved the post is visible to the users at large. Their first three posts are moderated before they are unlocked for open posting. We did recently go through an upgrade of the software and this feature didn't start until after the upgrade so maybe it's a new feature that available with an upgrade???