Gagging On Spam

[wfwhitaker]

Lately there is an overwhelming amount of spam posts from certain parties who seem to register solely for that purpose. Even when the messages are deleted they come back under new registration to continue fouling the system. This afternoon's crop of crap takes the cake. Is there no means of controlling it or are we simply at their mercy?

[Bruce Watson]

Indeed. Seems like it might be a good idea to moderate a newbie's first 10 or 20 posts or so. If they can't make a few posts about LF, it ought to be a good indicator that they aren't here for LF, yes?

[Jan Pedersen]

Perhaps some of the most frequent and well trusted members of this forum could have limited moderator priviledges to take out these unwanted individuals (Spamers)
Just a suggestion.

[Eric Woodbury]

Or if that is too hard, limit newbies to one post per day.

[Frank Petronio]

My blog has been getting hit 20-50 per day for the past week, it seems like there is a spam offensive on the way. But Movable Type offers several anti-spam tools and junk filters, so I've been able to increase the filtering (at the expense of almost loosing a few valid comments). You still have to look and review them to make sure you don't filter a real comment.

[big_ben_blue]

It's getting out of hand. Everything from cheap electronics, shoes to shady photography services; one starts to wonder if the certain body parts enlargements ads are coming next (anyone here in in need for a larger format? ).

[Jim Jirka]

I am waiting for the body part reduction ad.

Waist.

[David A. Goldfarb]

We get these on APUG fairly regularly, and the best tool we have for combating them, which also exists on this forum, is for member to use the "Report Post" function, just by clicking on the red triangle with the exclamation point under the username of the spammer. This sends out an e-mail to all of the moderators, to let them know there is a problem, so that if they're online, but not on the forum or haven't noticed the spam yet, they are more likely to respond quickly.

When the moderators get a Post Report, they can quickly ban the spammer and delete all the spam, so don't respond to the spam in the forum, and don't start a thread about the spam--just report it, and the moderators will deal with it as soon as they are aware of it. On APUG, we often are able to ban the spammer and delete the spam within minutes of the first spam post. The LF forum is a smaller forum, with fewer people to report spam and fewer moderators, but if it gets reported quickly, the moderators can jump in and take care of it before it gets out of hand.

[Jan Pedersen]

David, I may be quite blind tonight but i can't find that red triangle, can you elaborate a little more on this?
Thanks.

[Geert]

Problem with reporting SPAM posts, is that the moderators get overloaded.
I really like the comment of Jan on this:

Perhaps some of the most frequent and well trusted members of this forum could have limited moderator priviledges to take out these unwanted individuals (Spamers)
Just a suggestion.

In case spam is noticed, in stead of reporting, they could just delete it. As for misuse, I'm sure that there is a 'tracking' possibility in the forums' administrative tools.

Another possibility is to give those only the rights to move a thread into a hidden trash-forum that gets emptied once in a while.

G