When some people want to spam on Cemetech, they usually make a new account and almost instantly make a post or two advertising a product.

Because they post almost instantly, Cemetech should have a period of time where new users can't post.

The funny thing is that I wouldn't be surprised if that actually increased the amount of spam posts dramatically. This is exactly what happened on CW when I enabled reCaptcha. Nowadays some bots seems stupidly programmed to look for an anti-spam feature (that they can usually solve) before they go any further.

I feel like this would strongly discourage people from joining just to ask a question. It's already annoying enough to have to create a forum account, especially for people who didn't grow up in the age range where forums were prevalent; we don't want to make it even harder for people to legitimately participate on the forums.

It's similar to the Minecraft server, I guess - I only made a Cemetech account because I had joined the Minecraft server, and I only joined the Minecraft server because there was no whitelist on it. I had no way of knowing at the time whether playing on the Minecraft server was going to be worth my time, so I definitely would not have joined if I had to join chat/the forum, ask someone why the text saying the server had no whitelist was wrong, get redirected to a Discord server, ask for someone to whitelist me, and then finally start playing.

It would be better to just automatically look at the first few posts each user tries to make and not post them if it looks too similar to a spam post, by some metric. I believe this is already happening, though there may be room for improvement in the metric used.

In any case, it's not really that big of an issue - it normally gets deleted within a few hours anyways.

I have a couple of suggestions.

1. Firstly, I do think that, like some other forums, there should be a karma threshold to create a new topic, but not to post on an existing one. I would also recommend that we implement referral links and if someone is referred here by an existing member, they bypass that restriction.

2. I think we also need to more clearly display the karma system. You should be able to give people karma on a post, not just in SAX. Like a thumbs up/down.

3. We need a post filter that scans for words like various shoe types and stuff like that. Now that doesn't necessarily ban the account (or someone like me who puts shoe in a post like I just did would be instantly banned). Instead, it only bans the account if it's a new account (say 1 month old) with less than the threshold of karma needed to post.

4. I also think that a post from a new user (same rubrics as the others), like a spam post, that gets downvoted to negative karma should be hidden and submitted for review by a mod/admin.

I hate the abused Karma system on Reddit, because people love mass−downvoting posts that they don't agree with instead of having a civil discussion in the comments section, which prevents people from having lots of karma to post on other subreddits.

I know on PokéCommunity, you need a certain number of posts before you're allowed to post links, so maybe we can have something like that for new users whose accounts are less than 3 days old.

Karma is only useful if users are encouraged to use it as a moderation tool and if you don't want to spend as much effort moderating by yourself. It also works better on more active fora. Even on Omnimaga and CodeWalrus it had its flaws (I think at one point only positive karma was allowed, I don't remember anymore).

Disallowing members from posting website links if they have no post is the most effective anti-spam out there so far I think, but it could be enhanced with a small whitelist (Github, ticalc, TI-Planet, etc). The user just has to edit his post with a link afterwards, and I don't think many spambots can edit their posts.

I personally disagree with this idea, as I feel that, as commandblockguy stated, this would make it difficult for new users to quickly get an answer to a question, or to receive feedback and encouragement on their programming projects.

I can support this with my own experience, as well--I joined because I saw that there was a "Cemetech Contest" going on, and I wanted to participate in it (this was CC22). The first thing that I did with my new account was make a thread for my contest submission. I imagine most true new users join to make posts like this: the only real point in having an account here is to participate in the forum and/or SAX/IRC, but I doubt that second option is particularly appealing to truly new users, as it's less popular than Discord among the youth.

So my final conclusion is, spam is a component of the forum that won't soon disappear. It may even make moderation more difficult, as instead of having the spam member join, make the spam post, and be quickly deleted, these members will be forced to lie dormant until the post is made, which might unnecessarily complicate things. I'd advocate for promoting more trusted members to moderator to solve the problem instead, as I feel like this solution wouldn't be an effective one.

womp (someone had to do it)

More seriously, more moderator is a good alternative. Maybe a faster way to ban spammers as new admin forum feature too?

I completely agree with commandblockguy. As useful as additional moderational tools would be, how practical would it be? I rather have exposure (once in a while) to the next cure-all herbal remedy/revolutionary shoe brand, then to have new members discouraged from asking legitimate questions, because of post "time walls" and such.

Anyways, spam posts are fun to read.

It's not like https://www.cemetech.net/forum/search.php?search_id=weekposts is filled with advertisements every now and then; those spam posts could be worse.


What if all new members had to complete a reCAPTCHA for only their first two posts?

I think the "no link for first post" policy is pretty good at blocking spammers without being annoying to other users. Without links, how do you get people to buy stuff / get scammed / whatever on your website?

Yes the spam posts may be removed in a few hours by moderators, but wouldn't it be good to reduce their workload?

That is an excellent point command about people not being used to forums because I guess they go back a generation. I don't believe Cemetech has any quick account style 'link google/fb etc' style stuff either ... though I imagine that would make things worse spam wise, which is the discussion at hand.