bhtooefr wrote:In any case, does phpBB not have a mod or something that can nuke a user from orbit? Delete all their posts (or maybe all but one), and ban the user?
Yeah, they do this all the time (just about every night, from the looks of it).
Captain Ned wrote:Yeah, this morning's lot was WAY over the top. Had to have been a bot to plonk 93 copies of the same message.
There were 101 when I looked last night (based on the post count of the offending account).
Welch wrote:Problem is, TR would be shooting themselves in the foot if they made it difficult for new users to post. Over the years I've seen guys posting on here SIMPLY to help out with a single problem, or with ask a question. That high traffic generally seems to come when there are new hardware releases on the horizon (Ivybridge, Kepler, ect). I've noticed a decent amount of new comers asking questions about new builds or waiting for Ivy bridge, same for the video cards recently. Heck a lot of the active people on the forums now are under 200 posts. Imagine if you had to jump through 1000 hoops just to post a legitimate question, you'd probably never had joined or stayed.
This is why I've suggested there be no barriers to signing up and posting, but that posts from new accounts are stripped of the {url} tag (or, better, the post fails to go up until the links are removed). And that restriction persists not for some amount of time or number of posts but until the poster requests and is granted permission to post links. This doesn't create any barrier to entry for new users of the site, and mostly doesn't impair their ability to get a question answered or a problem solved (most new users aren't posting links right away), but it removes the one thing the spammers are trying to obtain. It does create some work for the mods in granting these permissions, but that's infrequent compared to fighting spam and if it reduces the spam by any significant degree it sounds like a win. It won't stop spamming, of course, since the automated scripts will probably plow ahead and we'll get garbage posts without links instead of garbage posts with them, but it may have an effect over time if TR stops offering any SEO benefit to them. This is also why I like causing the post to fail back to the "preview" screen with an error message if a link is included (and the poster doesn't have "post links" permission) rather than just stripping the URL, since that would throw another wrench into the spammer's scripts, while also providing new users a hint that their account is actually limited in this way until they get linking permission. Of course there will be devious spammers who go to the trouble of looking legit long enough to get link permission, but we already have the problem of stealth accounts and whatnot, and not all of them are that clever or non-lazy so getting rid of the dumb/lazy ones is still a win. Fighting this scourge needs to involve creating barriers that are asymmetric with respect to the amount of effort it creates for the spammers vs the work it requires of the mods and users (new or not). It's never going to end, but making it more difficult may cause the bad guys to go elsewhere where the pickings are easier, at least temporarily.