Ideas to Thwart Spam

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3432

I wonder, is it possible to set some kind of slow start for the newcomers?
Say, limit the number of posts allowed to 1 per day until they reach 10 posts or something like that... Hopefully would be easy enough for new users, and annoying enough for spammers to make them give up before ending the trial.
Note: until 10 posts rather than for 10 days, because writing those posts takes some effort and makes spammers easy to spot. Waiting 10 days only takes time, which means one could prepare a spam bomb in advance avoiding both, the effort and early detection.

MarioCorleone · Guru Joined: 29 Jun 2003 Posts: 336

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

Filtering the first few posts of a new user through Akismet might help (and banning those who consistently trigger failure there). The service has a free tier up to ~1600 comments a day; I don't think we get that in total here on an average day.

Chiitoo · Posted: Tue Apr 05, 2016 12:17 pm Post subject:

Split from the reports topic.

Perhaps there indeed is something that could be done towards catching at least the most obvious ones, before they get too far. I have no idea what can be done with the current software, but perhaps we're going versions up some time sooner than later though. -.^

(Not that I know more regardless of version(s).)

The volume of spam we get is quite hefty, but we've got some great people working against it (and I do what I can, too!). Being people, however, they're not there 100% of the time, so sometimes some things get to be seen for much longer than usual.
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Kindest of regardses.