Time to reintroduce a quarantine period?

[Armchair Cyclist]

There has been a recent spate of first posts that either make no sense at all (I suspect bot produced picking quotes from random messages) and blatant spam, sometimes highly illegal (buy a residency permit).

I believe that in the past, the first posts of new members has had to be approved by an admin who can identify it as on topic, human produced and non-malign before they would appear on the page. I appreciate that this is a bit inconvenient for genuine new members, and adds to the burden of admins, but I suspect that the time has come for something along these lines to be re-introduced.

 

[Irondan]

You are correct in that Mods had to approve the first 10 posts of any new member due to exactly what you just explained, which seems to be happening again but as of yet is not at the same level as a couple of years ago when we had to make that drastic response due to the sheer volume of spam being posted. We were getting nailed with sometimes 100's spam threads every day and just could not keep up with the spammers without doing something to help level the playing field. The flip side of that coin is that it becomes very time consuming for mods and can be discouraging to new members who are not spamming the forum to come back onto the forum when they can't get a comment posted in a timely manner. There's a balance we have to strike in deciding to pre-moderate all new posts by a newbie, which is something that we'll discuss as a moderation team going forward and will certainly be monitoring the situation if we do nothing else.

Thanks!

 

[tobydawq]

You are correct in that Mods had to approve the first 10 posts of any new member due to exactly what you just explained, which seems to be happening again but as of yet is not at the same level as a couple of years ago when we had to make that drastic response due to the sheer volume of spam being posted. We were getting nailed with sometimes 100's spam threads every day and just could not keep up with the spammers without doing something to help level the playing field. The flip side of that coin is that it becomes very time consuming for mods and can be discouraging to new members who are not spamming the forum to come back onto the forum when they can't get a comment posted in a timely manner. There's a balance we have to strike in deciding to pre-moderate all new posts by a newbie, which is something that we'll discuss as a moderation team going forward and will certainly be monitoring the situation if we do nothing else.

Thanks!

Why not just the first or first 2 posts? 10 seems rather ludicrous....

 

[Yingge]

Well the latest spammer today has quite a few more than 2 posts - and he joined just 24 hours earlier.

 

[RedheadDane]

Maybe we should at least have a five minutes between making new threads rule. Things are getting a little insane here...