Wolfire Games Forums

So lately there has been a massive increase in spam posts. Even after implementing reCAPTCHA and other standard anti-spam features, along with like 30 community moderators, I am still seeing porn spam posts on the forum regularly.

So the new plan is to make it so that people who are not in the preorder group will need to have their first post authorized by a moderator.

This is sub-optimal as it will add a latency to people's posts, but I think it is the best we can do for now to avoid having hardcore porn on the forums regularly.

If anyone has any better phpbb spam suggestions that wouldn't inconvenience potentially legitimate posters at all I would love to hear about them!

Additionally I will need more volunteers to check the post queue to authorize non-spam posts.

Hey I'd be free for that probably!

Phil and I came up with a neat solution -- all Overgrowth preorders now have the power to authorize or deauthorize new people's posts so hopefully with that volume, we can crowd source it pretty effectively.

To clarify, every user's first post will require approval from now on. This is denoted on the forum index, topic list, and within a topic using this icon:

On the forum index, you'll see something like this:


Note the icon directly next to the "Last Post" author in the forum with an unapproved post. You may either click on it directly to view unapproved posts, or click view the forum. From here, you'll be able to note any topics with unapproved posts (see example below).



From here, you can either click on the icon or enter the topic. If you choose the latter, you'll be notified within the topic which post(s) require approval, like so:


At this point, you will reach the approve post screen (if you have not already). You may choose if you would like to approve or disapprove the post:

-----------------------------------------
Alternatively, you may click the Moderator Control Panel link in the header of the forum to view all posts that are awaiting approval.

I guess I will start off my first post in this thread. I don't even see why people would even want to spam that in a gaming forum since most people aren't dumb enough to click on the links.

TheArdentWriter wrote:I guess I will start off my first post in this thread. I don't even see why people would even want to spam that in a gaming forum since most people aren't dumb enough to click on the links.

It's all about pagerank and backlinks, generally. Anyone clicking on the links is just gravy as far as the bot-writer is concerned.

The spam was getting a bit much. This is a good move.

I like the idea and have already had it in use.
Nevertheless, I think you should encourage anyone with the power to accept/deny a post, to fill out the form, saying why you declined the post.

It's the hot new game from Wolfire. Spam blockers. Are you bored on the forum? Well, pre-order overgrowth and you get DA POWA! You can laugh at spammers and disapprove their posts instead of just dissaproving OF them!

Heh, it's a good idea. I blocked 3 earlier. In theory people who have actually bought the games will have an interest in blocking the assholes. And indeed, if they are bored, it gives them something to do as a sort of game.

I'd volunteer to moderate, I'm an experienced moderator on the Toribash forums, here's a link to the show-groups list where you can see i'm currently a supper moderator (blue names): http://forum.toribash.com/showgroups.php
Obviously I only have 20 or so posts here, but *shrugs* you never said post count was a requirement.

There isn't much you can do about spam protection since it's such a subjective problem, I've found active moderation teams to work on the Toribash forums, but we also use a system that merges consecutive posts made by the same person with less than 24 hours between them, which at-least stopped most double posts. Having people validated by a moderator seems appropriate, but you need to be very clear with the moderation team how relaxed they should be.

It should be pretty clear. Basically anything with a link to porn or viagra sites = spam. Anything by a real person = authorize.

Hmmm anyone who gets disapproved too much should get auto blocked. it looks like, blocking the spam just provokes the bot to keep on spamming, so in effect, it doesn't really solve the problem until the bot can actually get banned. Just like what seems to be happening in this thread.