Thanks, Will.

I think this is a good solution. What do you guys think?

Sounds good to me. 200 seems like overkill for the typical member, but that seems to be almost exactly the number of posts AAAAA and BBBBB managed to get in.

I agree that 200 is probably too many. The CAPTCHA will slow it down for sure, so we should probably drop that number.

What do you think? Maybe 50?

200 does seem to be about the most I’ve ever removed from 1 spammer. It’s a hassle for a new user, but Capcha is so commonplace now, that a simple explanation somewhere—maybe pinned @ top of forums, or included in new user signup—I think will get the point across that it’s necessary to prevent a lot of spamming that we’ve been getting recently. 50 will slow them down, and 200 does seem high … I’ll go along with anything in that range.

How about a lower Capcha threshold, see how it helps, and if needed, add a “Penalty Box” of some sort where an “untrusted” or new user has to have their posts approved by a mod or admin. before they publish? I think that was maybe Mim’s idea(???) a while back?

Alright, I have dropped it to 50 Eurotrip Points.

The Penalty Box idea came from RedFlagDeals member signup process. I was initially planned to do it, but I have not had time to. I had everything in place for this to essentially be ‘turned on’, so I figured we would start with this and see if extra development is needed.

Didn’t work. Now there were two “users” who spammed almost 500 posts. Watches and CCCCC. I cleaned it up, but it seems to be getting worse. We are going to have to have mods and editors verify a user after 1 post. Can we create a new class of user for those with < 1 post that only gain full access after first post is verified? This is the only solution I can think of…

I would say, use captcha until a user is verified. No problem?

These captcha is really annoying, hopefully you can get rid of it for everybody who is either:

-verified – member since a year – has done more than 25 posts which haven’t been flagged

When a user is spamming us you need to make sure to DELETE the post, not modify it. If you delete the post, they will loose the points they got. If you just modify they keep their points. Both CCCCC and Watches are considered Trusted Members (but they are banned) because they have about 270 ET Points…

Were their posts deleted???

Let me think about this and see if I can come up with a solution…

Yes — posts were deleted. They got around the captcha somehow. They posted as new members this morning. I deleted all of their posts and banned them.

Let’s get a verification function in.

They still have ET points even though all of their posts have been deleted, so something is amiss. I am looking into it…

I don’t think that matters since they joined after you instated the trusted member program. That means they had to break through the cactha anyway.

FWIW
I just deleted an obvious spam from the Pending queue.

Thanks Cil.