how to cut-down harmful spam

[Arterra]

anyone notice the spam we get? I honestly just saw someone post PRON here...
people with less then 10 posts should require pre-moderation for any post. also to try to stop then from mass posing before hand have 1 min per post until 10 posts are reached.
I call this period the trial period.

in fact, if this is too much for a forum manager, have a user-moderation thing. users with (say) 500 posts can accept/decline these and have to give reason why/why not. if the reason is like "trololol" or "that's against my religion" (reasons that are not acceptable for barring someone's opinion) pm a dev. things like "no PRON for u" or "We do NOT want a new HTC phone" are acceptable.

a working example is how in a certain dragon raising site yo can give descriptions to dragons, but other users have to vote it in. only users with 25 full grown dragons can vote and comment.

[CanonicalKoi]

It is getting worse. I reported Mr. Buy-Cheap-iPhones for posting in the New Members forum this morning. (shakes head)

[Royce]

Yeah, I think they will have to go with moderated posts for new users at some point, it's just inevitable as the game and forum grow. This is pretty similar to what I had discussed at one point in the chatbox. Basically, all posts or new threads by new members must pass through moderation before being posted. However, Samhayne seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth, and the devs are likely not interested in being full time forum mods, nor do I think they would let members moderate unless they plan to add forum moderators in general.

[Arterra]

if it works in one context, it can work here. the devs just need some user interaction trust... :/

[jonboy]

Guys, they are not real people, the anti-spam bot features of the registration process is failing.

[Arterra]

i can understand a bot made to advertise, but NOT one to post pron. just not right... damn those fat guys living in basements locked to 4chan 24/7!!

[MurdocX]

I agree with your idea. In order for that to happen, an administrator would have to make/edit some member class permissions in the ACP. It would be something along the lines of this:

Validating: Can view forums, no other permissions selected.
Member: Can view forums, posting allowed on: New Players and General Section forums. All posts will await pending approval from moderators/administrators.
Official Member: Can view forums, posting allowed on: All forums. No posting approval needed.

But the only way they can become an OFFICIAL member would be to get 10, spam free, moderated & approved posts. Similar to how you become a Senior Member, there are settings in the ACP that Administrators can enable to auto promote dependent on reaching a certain post count. Since all of their posts are monitored, they can't spam the two sections they can actually post in to become an Official Member.

Royce: I've Administrated, Moderated, and been an average Joe of many forums over the past few years. And for most of those forums it seems that active & constructive members tend to get promoted after a long period of activity on the forums. Not necessarily to a Global Moderator position, but usually a singular forum/sub forum moderator of the section(s) they're most active in. For the most part the original creators of a forum tend to find actually maintaining a forum as a tedious task and usually promote the active & constructive posting members for that purpose. Take yourself for example, you strike me as one to eventually be promoted to a forum moderator, same with Banned, and a few other members.

It's actually more likely that this will happen a few months after the PC & Android release. I would imagine by then the member count & post activity will have doubled it's current rate; more popularity; more spam; more upkeep.

[Arterra]

a incentive to not ignore the post moderation and take a active part would be some bar saying how many you have gone over. a better indicator of forum-guru than post count.