New GPWA Spam Prevention Measures

[MichaelCorfman]

This week we have taken a number of steps to reduce spam within the GPWA forums and blogs.

The most important step is that we have installed a vBulleting plug-in called Spam-O-Matic. Complete details about this plug-in can be found on the vBulletin website in the following thread: www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=248042.

Some of its features include:

1. A registration process that checks for known spammers using information such as ip and e-mail address and also reports to a database of spammers new spammers not yet in the database spamming the GPWA forums.

2. Auto-moderation based on too many links or specific disallowed keyword for posters below a specific post threshold.

3. Support for the concept of a Newbies group with fewer privileges, and with automatic graduation out of that group based on enough non-spam posts.

4. Integration with the Akismet spam detection service.

We are making use of all of these features.

We have created a new group of GPWA members called "New Members" and we have placed all "Public Members" who have fewer than ten posts into the "New Members" group.

All "New Members" are now subject to special additional checks performed by Spam-O-Matic. For example, posts by new members with links are no longer publicly posted until they are reviewed by a moderator. And we have restricted what "New Members" can do. For example, we now prohibit "New Members" from creating blogs, which we expect will eliminate the severe blog spam problem we have had in the recent past.

Michael

[davemerry]

Good stuff Michael - I've not been here for that long but even I have noticed the spam levels increasing over the last recent months, great to see you are taking an active approach towards combating it!

[SlotsAff]

This is great Michael - I hope the GPWA can get rid of the crap that's been infiltrating the forums lately

[LuckyBettors - Jamie]

Its a shame a messure cant be put in place when people flame each other Great stuff so far though.

[craig96]

It is nice to see that more stuff is being done to try and combat the spam. It looks like the spammers will have to actually get involved in the convos now. Muaha.

[davenewgates]

This is great! I hope that in this way spammers will take hold of their clever tactics. Being strict and setting rules will just make sure the forum will be as useful and as efficient as possible.

[universal4]

This is great news, I will be sure to tell my friends aout this.

Rick
Universal4

[NickyV]

Spam-O-Matic is very usefull plugin to prevent from spammers. as i use it on my board too, spam postings decresed to almost 0.
good choice!

[wagerjunction]

Great news Michael

Thank you GPWA for adopting these measures.

[jenbates]

This is great news! Although I'm new here, I'm glad that you are looking after what happens on this site.

[baldidiot]

That's great news, thanks Michael!

Something else that could be done to clean out spam is to have a system for reporting similar to the one on yahoo answers - if enough members (or a member that is "trusted") report a spam post, it is automatically booted out for moderation.

Just figured it would save the mods a bunch of time!

[kwblue]

Good work GPWA! We did this several months back and it has helped tremendously. It HAS caught a few that shouldn't have been flagged, but that little snag is well worth it to decrease spam.

[universal4]

baldidiot, there is already a system in place for reporting spam.

If you suspect a post to be spam, below each post there is a link (the little triangle) and if you click on that it will send a report of the post to the moderators and we investigate them.

Rick
Universal4

[Webzcas]

This mod is superb Michael and has caught many spammers who have got past the ISBot registration mod on my politics forum. In the process now of adding it to my casino forum on casinos-online.co.uk.

[BenjaminMarketing]

There are alot of mods that can be added to vbulletin forums.. I use SMF myself, and get nailed with spam messages...etc. Might be time for me to switch to vbulletin or IPforums..

[michael1981]

Really great news and should definitely improve the quality of this great forum

If I see anything that looks like spam, i'll personally report it myself because this is an old and very respected forum.