Renewing development, first target: eliminate spam

Posted on 2009-03-25 15:11:06-07 by szabgab

I have not been working on CPAN::Forum for a long time. I kept postponing it but there are a couple of things that got urgent now so I have to do something about them.

One of them is SPAM. We have seen a recent surge in SPAM on the forum. I can keep deleting the posts manually but I think there has to be a better solution.
So I was thinking about the following. For each post and each user add an approved bit. When a user registers she is not approved yet so an administrator has to approve each post of that user. That is, such posts won't be displayed not will e-mail go to the regular users about the posts.

If a suer seems not to be a spammer and administrator can approve the user. From that time any post by that user will be automatically approved.

What do you think?

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Posted on 2009-03-25 18:38:25-07 by exiftool in response to 10321

Re: Renewing development, first target: eliminate spam

I don't like this idea. For 2 reasons:

1) The board members won't see immediate feedback about their posts. Also, this will slow down response time to valid posts.

2) This sounds like it requires much more upkeep than just deleting spam posts once they are found.

I prefer doing this:

A. Change the login to require the user answer a simple question to stop spambots.

B. Allow posts and user accounts to be deleted to force the manual spammers to re-create their accounts.

If the spam doesn't live long on the board, then the manual spammers will eventually give up and find another board to spam. I can monitor all posts and delete spam very quickly during business hours.

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