New Member Rule Suggestion

[OHayou]

My first ever "new thread" is of a more serious and somber tone:

I have noticed that every once in a while a pesky solicitor will pop on and spam some of their malarkey peddling whatever merchandise they are peddling or someone will just spam random statements endlessly.

Why not offer New Members the ability to post as much as they want but within time constraints such as once every 10 minutes for 1 day. Then after 1 day is up they can post as much as they want.

The time period can be adjusted but the basic premise is to limit "uncomfirmed" people's posts to a minimal amount until there is enough user interaction with the community to form a general idea of the direction this person is headed.

Rule stipulation: In order to activate "new member" flag a user must post a meaningful message and not just create account, type a random sentence, wait x days, and start spamming their merchandise.

I'm sure at least one moderator pops online once every couple hours and would catch any spamming/random spamming statements and the collateral damage would be limited to only a few posts.

Seems like an easy rule to implement ...mainly because I don't have to do anything except suggest an idea (the easiest part) lol

[Nameless]

Maybe it could be set, as an algorithm that does not allow users to posts links to websites unrelated to japan or the main subject of the subforum.

That said, I am unsure how much effort such algorithm would take.

Another option could be allowing users to post links only when they have a minimum of posts.


Oh well, those are my ideas, I hope they are useful.

[spicytuna]

I'm really starting to like this idea.

Is there any way to prevent people from posting until they've been a member for at least 24 hours?

This would greatly drop the number of forum-bots which continually spam this forum.

Of course the best method (as I mentioned before) is to upgrade Vbulletin so that it incorporates an advanced captcha during user registration but for now, a limit on new members might do the trick.

[OHayou]

After being a member for a a little bit now I agree that the spammers are evolving. It seems they are reading our ideas about having a post with actual conversation and not just a link because now the spammers are copying and pasting bits and parts of previous conversation and trying to make it their own while including a link.

I agree with you guys when you say a "captcha" system is the way to go.

If not, then some kind of time period has to be implemented in between posts and links definitely have to be eliminated from posts until after so many posts have been made.

I think the time period should be after one becomes a "JF Regular" (25 posts) then:

A) they could put a link in
B) No longer have to wait 5/10 minutes in between posts
- Doesn't seem like a hassle anyway since it takes that long to find a
thread, read through it, and decide if you want to post.

Also: We have observant people on here that report spammers/flame threads/etc and would be able to report a spammer copying and pasting parts of conversation just to make it a "passable" thread before they reach their 25 post initiation.

The main problem is---since the moderators seem to have limited rights and the administrator is not in contact with them -- can they even implement any of these ideas. If not, maybe they should just remove this entire part of the forum but .. do they even have the rights to do that lol

[Nyororin]

These types of ideas are great, and as one of the ones who has to go through and delete countless spam messages every day... I would LOVE to see something like this implemented.

Unfortunately, we mods can do nothing but run around and clean up the mess. There is no way for us to do anything other than remove posts and ban users. The admin is pretty much completely absent, so there is nothing that can be done but hope that they show up again and decide to add more features... Which the chances of seem quite slim if the past number of years have been anything to go by.

[Nameless]

How about giving the ownership to someone else?
Or re creating the forum? (like copying the existing database in a new server, new owner etc...).

[Nippom]

Congratulations to Nyororin on reaching 4K posts!

[Nyororin]

While I agree that your suggestion is a good one, neither I nor any of the other mods are in the position to accept money from you to apply toward a service. We are really essentially nothing more than volunteers and have no direct affiliation with the administration of this site.

If you want to independently register and pay for the service and forward links you spot in spam here to them, I don't think anyone would be upset... But we mods just simply don't have the ability to ok a service or to register the site with one. That is something the admins would have to do... And they are almost entirely absent from what I can tell.

At this point, it really feels like if the few active mods stopped showing up, the whole site would collapse in a sea of spam.

[angelo50]

The measure punctuation can be weighted but the primary presuppose is to bound "uncomfirmed" fill's posts to a negligible total until there is sufficiency user interaction with the group to become a pervasive intent of the way this person is headed.

[spicytuna]

Hahahaha!

Talk about insult to injury.

A spambot posting in this new member rule suggestion thread as it re-hashes the very statement which needs to be emphasized.