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[zztong]

I sense a configuration change coming to the forums to deal with a flood of junk posts about coupons, etc. I don't mind reporting them, but the rate of their appearance is increasing.

 

[Syphon583]

I had the same thought. All this work to switch forums for better security and we still get junk like that.

 

[Rotor]

Thought this software was supposed to be mobetah!

 

[EvilPolygons]

Yeah, it's starting to get obnoxious. Way worse than the old forums. TFP might want to consider having new accounts' first post held for mod review to weed out the spammers.

 

[LittleNightma]

Getting excited to see notifications only for half of them to be about CBD gummies or Expedia

 

[Riamus]

Yeah, it's starting to get obnoxious. Way worse than the old forums. TFP might want to consider having new accounts' first post held for mod review to weed out the spammers.

That isn't really a great option, especially when many first posts are for support. Moderators aren't around 24/7 to approve posts quickly. I've had posts with links on the old forum take 24-48 hours to appear sometimes. Even here, sometimes it takes quite a while for a moderator to be around to handle something.

Unfortunately, there's little you can really do to stop such spam. You can put in spam filters that look for certain text, and maybe they'll do that and only hold those for review. When I used to run my own forum, I used to block ranges of IP addresses that were commonly used by spammers. That made a huge difference. However, that also blocks legitimate people. For my forum, I wasn't concerned about that, but for something like this game, they aren't likely to want to do that. So it comes down mostly to just watching for those and removing them.

I also wouldn't say it's worse than the old forum. These things come in waves. You may not have seen it happen on the old forum because of that, but there were times when we had a full page of ads on multiple forums here with the old forum.

 

[Suxar]

That isn't really a great option, especially when many first posts are for support.

I agree. This is important for error messages.

Moderators aren't around 24/7 to approve posts quickly. I've had posts with links on the old forum take 24-48 hours to appear sometimes. Even here, sometimes it takes quite a while for a moderator to be around to handle something.

It's a matter of setup. I've seen forums that would allow links to certain domains, but all others would go to a moderator for approval.

 

[Riamus]

It's a matter of setup. I've seen forums that would allow links to certain domains, but all others would go to a moderator for approval.

Yes, that was how the old forum was. But it can be a challenge to prevent people from obfuscating links to get around automatic detection. These days, you could use AI to prevent most of that, I think, but I doubt the forum has that option. So it's based on rules, such as looking for .com or http or www. But you can find ways to bypass that by using spaces or other things. The link won't be possible to click, but you'll still get the spam, and that's enough for these bots.