Spambots and the General Forum

[Deleted]

Hello there!

Recently, it seems that the spambots are attacking this forum more and more:



Instead of deleting all those threads by hand, and banning said accounts, make it so that only accounts with at least +10 posts can open a new thread (at least in general and other forums that are spammed).

Just an idea ;-)

[Tziva]

I'm just going to paste this from the last thread:

the reasons we don't have any restrictions on thread creation for new accounts is that if spambots are not allowed to make new threads, they post in existing threads. This makes them enormously harder to spot then when they make a brand new thread with a super obvious title, and it makes cleaning up their posts much more time consuming. The current system means we can clean up spambots significantly faster.

I know they post very rapidly and it can often look like we don't catch them very fast (and sometimes it is hard in hours when less mods are around) but this way is absolutely the most efficient way.

What you guys also don't see is that for every spam thread that gets through, our spamfilter catches dozens more. There are thousands of threads that get caught before they even make it on the forums. Yes, what you see can be pretty bad at times, but a lot of effort goes into making sure it's not a lot worse than it is.

We appreciate the ideas since we hate them as much as y'all, but unfortunately things are set up how they are for best results.