Spring RTS Engine

I'm around the forums a lot, and I could probably catch them before a lot of the current mods do.

Been a long time since I looked at how phpbb permission structure worked, but could you throw me on a group with limited bot bitchslap powers? Unfortunately I have a sinking feeling that the permissions aren't that granular.

The way its currently done, spam is dealt with by deleting user accounts, and this is only accessible to administrators. Moderators & sufficiently privileged users can delete individual threads and posts, but for spambots this takes too much time/clicks, so we generally don't.

But +1 (again) to first post approval and other more effective ways of preventing spam.

+1 first post approval too

+1 something. Now half the first page is cluttered by posts about nutrition, and they don't self-categorise anymore to the dedicated thread.

+1 firs post approval

what about this ?

http://www.stopforumspam.com/

Ihave implemented it and killed the rest of the spam that the firewall didn't catch

found the phpbb plugin : https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/exte ... orum_spam/

first approval can become a chore but yes +1

Could we train a nn to do it?

How many new poeple do sign up per day? Do we have statistics? And how many first posts per day?

memberlist.php?mode=&sk=c&sd=d#memberlist

You won't see non-current spambots there, because those users get deleted.

There are normally also several signups each week that don't post (they sometimes spam adverts into their user profile without posting). Those mostly don't appear there because we recently had a purge and deleted all users with 0 posts.

But you can see the signup-rate of genuine users there.

So I count 26 since end of March, averaging ~2-3 per week. Sounds manageable, but it's of course up to the admins to decide. Also note that some genuine people might register and may want to lurk the forums before they post.

I am playing with the settings to do as asked, as ever phpbb is byzantine, and I have my reservations as to the efficacy of this approach.

If it can be setup correctly I don't think the moderator team will have a time issue activating posts. Probably doable within a few hours.
The only reason you see those spam posts up so long is because no one wants to deal with them. It's super tedious, especially for moderators. Admins can at least delete users and all their posts directly, where we have to delete all posts and ban them, which requires a lot of stupid clicking.

It's done btw but settings won't apply properly to certain subforums and I have no idea why. Fortunately they are not ones commonly posted to by spammers.