General discussion about spam and inappropriate posts

[CopyrightAid]

As I suppose we should expect, there are some who want to treat this forum as a free-for-all to post ads to their pharmacy or porn sites.

I am of course checking every new post and removing inappropriate submission and banning the users, and will be looking into changing the forum code base to reduce this issue.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear from you..

[CopyrightAid]

Just updated the forum code to remove from the members list all users who have not posted, and to remove the web url option at registration.

Members can still add a URL for their home page under profile, but this will not appear on the member list until the user has actually posted something.

[CopyrightAid]

Just to say that I have been doing a lot of work on the forum since the last post, and think I have solved the spam problems.

Starting today, the policy is that before any links are allowed in posts, the user must be registered over 7 days and have made at least 10 posts (this only includes legitimate posts - posts that are removed as inappropriate do not count towards this total.)

[CopyrightAid]

Well the idiots still keep registering, but give up when they can't past links to pharmacy.com, (heh, heh). This unfortunately means that our database is full of inactive users.

Not to worry, I've just added a little bit of code that automatically deletes users that registered over 31 days ago, but have failed to post.

Update - to give you an idea of the scale of abuse a forum such as this attracts, there are around 1000 such users/attempts to abuse the facilities every month.

[CopyrightAid]

Well there seems to have recently been a spate of idiots who just like posting garbage (mostly about porn). I monitor the forum most days, so remove these promptly as a rule, but I hate wasting my time on such idiots.
I have therefore added a new fix to the forum code that will automatically block anyone posting content with 'bad words' in it and disable their account. Over the coming weeks I will be adding to the 'blocked words' list and this will hopefully pretty much eliminate the problems. I have implemented this so that regular users should not be affected - there is a threshold based on number of previous posts.

Any problems.... let me know.