Spam II

Hello everyone,

Please post your opinion here. I want to know if we should restrict new users from posting and only give them access to an Introduction forum where they must leave a reason why they need full posting access. Then manually upgrade them.

Even then, I am not sure we can eliminate all the POS spammers. Most of the ones that have gotten through were human and not machine. So even if I limit the posting, I am not sure if it would curb the spam.

Any ideas or comments are welcome (except spammers).

The forums don't get a lot of traffic, except for bots and spammers. So, it would definitely be nice to reduce things to actual user traffic.

But, I have concerns that if we force new users to an intro forum, we'll accomplish basically two things -

1) All spam will now be in one place (this might actually be a positive)

2) Users that don't have permission to post elsewhere will ask questions in the intro forum, turning it into the de facto "new user help forum". (Until the post gets moved and we give the user additional permissions). This isn't ideal, IMO. (but then again, neither is dealing with spam, so...)

So I think it would be OK if that's what you want to do. But I'd rather see us try some other measures before resorting to locking things down. I don't really want to broadcast potential anti-spam measures, so I'll post something privately.

1 members and 510 guests <---- probably ALL Bots because about 1/2 are trying to post stuff but cant because they are a guest.

Do you think it would be ok to limit what the unregistered guests can see to just System Announcements, ShowEQ News, MySEQ News, and the 2 Help Forums? I don't know if it would cut down on any bots or not.

I would really like to cut ALL forms from being visible out unless you are registered which would kill all the bots.