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slime wrote:I often let it sit for a few days because if it did come from a spam bot they tend to edit the post afterward to include spam links in that case.

The problem with this however, when someone is desperate to ask a question but the post is on hold for days it can be extremely frustrating. in the past I did ignore forums and communities for this reason alone, by the time my post was approved I moved on.

Personally I like that system better in the very first post, no links, images, videos allowed and posts are limited to 1 every 24 hours for 2-3 days.
Reply to posts again can not include links, images, videos and limited to only 1 every couple hours for 2-3 days.
Editing is not allowed, an admin need to give permission manually or get it automatically after few posts.
After 2-3 days, you become a full user and can post, edit, reply, include links, images, videos as much as you want.

It is allow people to post their first question and get a reply immediately and limit the damage to minimum in case it is a spam bot that hopefully a moderator going to notice within few hours anyway.

ddabrahim wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 6:01 pm

slime wrote:I often let it sit for a few days because if it did come from a spam bot they tend to edit the post afterward to include spam links in that case.

The problem with this however, when someone is desperate to ask a question but the post is on hold for days it can be extremely frustrating. in the past I did ignore forums and communities for this reason alone, by the time my post was approved I moved on.

I don't do that for people asking questions or anything else that's obviously not spam. I do it for posts that look like spam (as I said in the part you edited out of the quote). For example I approved this post about half an hour after it was made, since it didn't look like spam: viewtopic.php?p=256003

Ive noticed in several forums the amount of spamming drastically went down in the past years.
So this is all just moderation effort and not the amount of spammers going down?
This kinda shakes my wordview a little.

slime wrote:I do it for posts that look like spam (as I said in the part you edited out of the quote). For example I approved this post about half an hour after it was made

Yes but what if you and other moderators busy with life staff for a couple weeks no time for the forum. I can't imagine you always be around 7 days a week forever regardless the forum may still be alive. For example when I registered on the Cocos forums I had to email a moderator to approve my first post after 2 days because I could not even DM people until I was approved. The fact I did find this email was pure luck.

Anyway, I guess what I just wrote also depends on the forum engine used. Just wanted to share my opinion on manually approving first posts.

Spam get often into forums not as a bot, but as real people from africa posting endlessly until they get blocked.I dont know a solution to exclude them from here. Yes, it is very annoying to get spam. In another forum i have seen it oftentimes. But the approval is annoying to new users, if it takes more than a day to get approved.

I will try to make my posts less suspicius in the future.

Pinko

In my opinion, the best solution against Spam is having a lot of moderators around all day, who are able to block the spammer immediately. I can only point you to the topic of this post. (hint)