Suggestion for "processing" new users

[Walter Schulz]

Some time ago there were serious troubles with spammer accounts. To avoid this new user posts have to be approved before becoming visible as forum posts. This has the unpleasant side effect that some posts slip under the "Recently Updated Topics" radar and have a risk of remain unanswered. Especially if they are placed in threads with some traffic by regulars. "EOS M" thread for example. Especially if said approval takes days, even weeks (yes, happened).

What about a process avoiding this: A new member will get a notification about mandatory user introduction (we have such a forum here). Notification includes a section about waiting for that post to become visible before posting in other areas.

Done, both problems adressed.

[71m363nd3r]

I share your opinion too.

[Kharak]

What about a process avoiding this: A new member will get a notification about mandatory user introduction (we have such a forum here). Notification includes a section about waiting for that post to become visible before posting in other areas.

Done, both problems adressed.

You write "Done", so is it done? or do you mean as in then it would be no problem?

A mandatory user introduction sounds like a no brainer, if so many posts are getting lost in threads.

And if the users can't figure it out, then they probably shouldn't be messing with ML anyways.

So here is to all the users forgotten in EOS M thread with a bricked camera and no Forum profile 

[ChristianEOS]

Magic Lantern was always open source for an open opinion. I do think the rights for speech still to remain like with every other forums.

[Audionut]

The amount of spam registered accounts and posts is rather crazy.

The forum appears to have some form of spam account protection, but the last hit on that is from back in early 2017, and thus appears to no longer be working. Possibly around the time that manual post approval became a thing? The current solution does work well for catching spam accounts and posts, but suffers from the issues in the OP and the amount of manual intervention required.

I've just finished updating IP blocklists on my router firewall and instantly thought about what can be done with this forum, and found this post . Some form of automated filtering is needed imo. I have manually blocked some IP ranges previously which seems to help.

This site contains an automatically updated feed of numerous IP lists used for filtering. Some interesting ones for a forum are probably this one (free) and this one (not free (the self contained service (the IP list is free))).

There's also a free spam blocker mod for SMF that's probably useful.
I like the option "Blacklist of IP's/Ranges added to the ban list by Spam Blocker" which looks similar to what my firewall does, which allows the import of multiple lists and presumably has some form of auto update.


Some more resources that may be helpful.
Adds some new settings based on post counts to help curb link spammers.
Prevent Adding Signature Images And Links.

[ChristianEOS]

Good thought...
If you need any help just PM me
I didn't see any yes spam in the
 forum topics
 Video gallery
Picture gallery
And any personal messages...

[ilia3101]

More IPs should be blocked. I added three IP addresses manually to the blocklist, from which about 100 posts had come, and that by itself has stopped over 19,000 requests in a few days.

My main issue with approving new posts is how long the forum search takes (for detecting duplicate posts), occasionally it's instant, but most of the time it takes closer to a minute. This is what puts me off. Can this possibly be addressed? If this was fixed I would be doing it much more regularly. I feel really bad for the users who haven't been approved for about a month.

Another idea: automatically block new users who's post have fake underscore links, like this:     -maybe by detecting the following pattern: "]  [/url]"

[Audionut]

I added three IP addresses manually to the blocklist, from which about 100 posts had come, and that by itself has stopped over 19,000 requests in a few days.

Those IP's are from a company that supplies shared hosting, VDS/VPS and dedicated servers. Those IP's also triggered in feeds on https://otx.alienvault.com/

There is no need for members to be browsing this site from a dedicated hosting server, so I've nuked that entire IP range.