Due to the sudden increase in spam threads created by newly registered members I have decided that some restrictions needed to be placed on the abilities new users had.

These restrictions are as follows:

A newly registered member cannot view any forum attachments. If another member has attached some files for other members to download a new member will now need to take part in the forum and make some posts before they can then access and download attachments.

You don't need to post too many times before this restriction is lifted.

The second and more important restriction is that newly registered members cannot post any Links, Images or email addresses in the posts they make. When you first become a member of this forum you can now only post plain text.

This restriction is automatically lifted after you have posted a specific number of posts on the forum. I am not going to state how many posts are needed before this restriction is lifted and you can then post links, images or email addresses within your posts, but i will say that it hasn't been set to a silly number and all serious active new members won't feel this is restrictive in any way.

If you have any questions about this new restrictions please ask.

In addition the forum rules have also now been updated to include additions to restrictions relating to SPAM.
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I'd have thought it would be more conveniant to just put some decent anti spam mods in.
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Please suggest some anti-spam mods that prevent a real person from registering on the forum and then posting a spam email by hand? Only a spam bot would be blocked automatically via automated anto spam mods, which are actually already on the site too.
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I suppose at this point me offering to sell you guys some cheap Viagra would not be all that funny?


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Oh. Real people are easy to deal with. You arn't going to get anywhere near as many of them as you will spam bots.
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But... all of the spam we have been getting recently seem to be real people.
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okay I do have a couple of ideas that might help,

firstly most bots have a time to detonation in payload. so my theory is, after signing up to the forums, why not have a 10 or 15 minute delay of suspended account after activation ?

personally I think word sensors are completely mad, and as you knw my good friend, theres more cons than pros for them, so what I proposed is that your first 5 posts after account initialization go on the moderation cue?

just some thoughts...


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Yes real people are easy to deal with. You implement the spam prevention rules that Harrison has. You'll find that the conmen are going to start exploiting all the cheap labour in India and China so the occurrence of this sort of spamming is going to increase rapidly so it is best to act now especially as our Google profile is getting higher.
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I've now also added a keyword filtering mod to the forum. New member's posts will now be examined by the server against a list of keywords. If the post is found to contain any of them it will automatically be placed in the forum moderation queue and will not appear on the site until a moderator has looked at it and confirmed it to be OK.
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NIIICEEE.... remind me to pat you on the back next time i see you
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