Change to article submission to combat spam

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Steven.'s picture
Steven.
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Joined: 27-06-06
Jun 25 2012 17:24
Change to article submission to combat spam

Hi all, just wanted to let everyone know that we have had a massive raft of spam recently, including fake news and library articles.

These are real problem as they go out on feeds and syndicated to other sites, so if spam gets on here we will get penalised by Google.

As a result I have had to restrict article-posting rights. Now articles cannot be posted by any user, they can only be posted by a user who is confirmed as genuine.

All regular users should be confirmed as genuine already. If you have any issues posting articles please just post a comment below, or start a thread in the feedback forum, and we will make sure you are recorded as a genuine user.

If you are newly registered to libcom.org and wish to post articles please introduce yourself in the welcome thread here and we will mark you as genuine.

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions about this please feel free to post below.

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Juan Conatz's picture
Juan Conatz
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Joined: 29-04-08
Jun 25 2012 23:33

Yeah, something has got to be done about this. I spent probably 30-40 minutes on Saturday banning users and deleting spam.

Having a thread where you have to post first before you get posting privilges elsewhere (ABC had this) might work.

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slothjabber
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Joined: 1-08-06
Jun 26 2012 15:59

Apart from the idea of 1-validating accounts, and 2-fulfilling posting instructions, I have three other suggestions to combat spam, two of which I've raised in the 'point out spammers here' thread, and the third I've just thought of.

The first is that posters have to reach a certain post-count before they can post links; if spammers have to post 25 times before they can put in the link to their site selling Australian rugs, they won't bother I don't think. And if they do, there's more opportunity to find them and stop them (during the previous 25 posts) before they get around to it.

The second is to allow all of us powers to boot posts into touch; give us all spam detecting powers, and allow a system that temporarily deletes posts from the board and puts them in a holding area, so a mod can either OK them or permanently delete them when they get the chance. In the meantime, the posts aren't cluttering up the forums. Obviously this is open to abuse, but as mods will be looking over the posts anyway, it'll be easy to see if someone is abusing it, I'd think.

The third is to disallow links, and put all posts with links into a moderating queue as with the 'rejected' posts above. I wouldn't think that this would be the best solution by any means, but it's an option.