I find myself reporting a fair amount of spam posts (as do many others), but it’s really annoying to have to wait 47 more seconds to then post the “reported” reply to the post so others know it’s been reported already. Any way to change this?
What I do is post the “reported” first, so there are no double-reports, and then I give them negative rep so people know they’re spammers, and then I report the post. It helps with the wait 47 seconds thing and it keeps the admins’ inboxes a bit cleaner.
Based on my experience, reporting a post apparently isn’t subject to the 47 second rule, so you can save a little time by posting, then reporting. You’ll still have to wait the 47 seconds before you post on another spam thread.
I’ve been doing the report before the reply, which does trigger the 47 second delay. I’ll try it the other way around to see if it helps. Thanks.
We don’t care if the spam is double reported, triple reported, or reported 47,000 times (okay maybe the last one is a little much), just report spam if you see it. You may be surprised to hear that we do have filters on the back end which detect and block a lot of it from posting but the occasional spam does get through.
Is there any way you can stop members from posting links if newer than a certain age or post count? (Although, the latter may induce more spammy posts in other threads to boost post count.)
Or better still, if the post count of the member is say… under 25, or 50, tag the links “no follow” so there’s no Google incentive to post them here.
The problem is they make a post without the link and then edit it in.
I think their incentive for them to post here is that all the links on CD pass Google Pagerank. That’s good for real teams and information, and even better for spammers… Hence my edit-on idea of tagging the links “no follow” below a certain post count threshold.
Most of the spam posts I’ve seen have a much higher proportion of links than normal non-spam – maybe disallow posts where more than half the text is hyperlinked, combined with a hard cap on the number of links that can be included?
The issue is the posts actually start out as normal text and then get edited to contain links.
The easiest solution I see is disabling editing posts for new accounts. But that could cause other issues.
Bumping this as we’ve had another nasty rash of SPAM lately… There has to be something we can do to either make it unpalatable (nofollow) or impossible (link / edit limits).
The simple solution is to post “Reported” first, and then reporting the post as spam. This has the added benefit of reducing the likelihood of duplicate reports.
Did that… Still a bunch of reported posts from last night (~+12h ago) are still live.
(Like the most recent 5 or so in Rumor Mill)
I’m pretty sure the reason for that is not all moderators have access to all forums, so the ones who moderate Rumor Mill (or Brandon Martus) likely have not had a chance to delete them them yet.
Quite understandable… which is why I was suggesting (above) some ways to discourage it happening in the first place. I’ve found in other forums that making links nofollow (at least for low post count / new users) has a large effect on the amount of link spam (not overnight, but they eventually notice).
The other thing is that many of these spam accounts will sign up with the same hard coded password. Blocking these passwords (they’re random strings) really throws them for a loop too.
I like what discourse does where posters under TL3 (Trust Level 3) automatically have nofollow added to it. Since vbulletin doesn’t have the concept of trust levels, something with # of posts or reputation can probably be worked out.
Or we can just use discourse… Though that’s a discussion for another time 
Exactly… There is no instant solution that doesn’t have other instant(ly larger) problems, but making it less palatable, IMHO, should be the goal.
As far as switching forum software goes (as this version of vBulletin is a bit anemic):
That was end of Sept last year, however, it’s nearly a year in beta so far, with their FAQ and GitHub roadmap showing no end in sight.
That said, I’m just trying to make the most of what we have. 