...but I'm getting off (
) my original topic. I guess my question is: are any plans being made to prevent this from happening? It's obviously people and not bots, because of the confirmation code required for registering. [[EDIT: Or ARE they bots, I wonder... The confirmation code is pretty clear. Places like Yahoo and Hotmail are much more difficult to decipher.]] That would severely cut down on options for filtering. I just had a few ideas that came to mind, so I figured I'd share them.1. Invitation Only
If anyone here ever tried to get a Gmail invite when it first came out, you know what I'm talking about. Lock down the forum so guests don't even know it's here, and hand out a certain number of invites to people (tied into seeds, anyone?) If anybody wants to join the WG community, they can track down an existing member and request an invite.
PROS: Would definitely make it easier to screen out some spammers, would probably improve the quality of the members coming in (as opposed to "I'm gonna join this forum just so I can make one post to trick people into going to goatse"),
CONS: I didn't know anybody in this forum when I first found it, would require people to go through other forums to meet people from WG (which kinda invalidates the whole thing), would require re-working the registration system, as well as making a system to manage invites.
2. Request Only
About 2 years ago, I had a goth girlfriend (yeah, I know) who was a big fan of DarkPoetry.com. I was never overly impressed with angsty little kids, but I liked the way you got a guest account there: you could get a basic membership by writing a little paragraph about yourself and why you wanted to join. You could also get a more permanent membership just by sending in a postcard with your name on it. Personally, I'm always broke, but a postcard and a stamp aren't entirely out of my reach.
PROS: Postcard would be a good way of filtering out people who are serious (doesn't take a lot of time, money, or effort, but is a good way of showing that you at least care enough to spend $1.40. Even request would be useful, because you could have a sub-forum dedicated to incoming requests, and we could all vote on it using the existing poll system. It would also be cool to have scans of the postcards (front and back) online.
CONS: One of the more obvious ones is nationality. Postage between different countries can get pricey, and we all have much better, greener things to spend our money on. Also, a spammer might still be tempted to write a convincing-sounding request that would let him get in just long enough to post 5-10 ads.
3. Donation Only
First of all, let me start by saying that my broke ass is the last one in the world that should be suggesting a donation to join the forums, but let us palaver on the topic anyways for a moment. A 50-cent (30p, 5 pesos, etc.) donation isn't much, and anybody with a bank account can set up a PayPal account. It would contribute to the upkeep of the forum, and show that you're serious about it.
PROS: PayPal is relatively easy, but...
CONS: ... many people don't have a bank account, and those under the age of 18 may not be able to set one up without their parent's permission. Said parents may also object to even a small amount of money going to "Weed Guru". There's also the fact that paying to talk to people on a forum is not really something I would do.
4. "Trial" Sub-Forum
Make it so that new members can only post in a designated area for the first 7 days. Have it so that there's a little "- / +" button right next to their name that you can click to vote to reject them or accept them. If they get enough ban votes, they're gone. If they're not entirely useless, the trial restrictions are removed. This doesn't have to be time-based, it could also be point-based.
PROS: There's already ways in phpBB to create classes of user that have different access to different forums. You could use the seeds as points. It would also keep all the idiots confined to one area, while easily allowing promising members to be picked from the rabble.
CONS: If it was a community responsibility to monitor the trial forum, how many people would actually log on and want to check the "spam forum"? There's also the matter of complicating things with more coding, and decisions about how many positive/negative votes for certain things, etc.
Anyway, these were just my thoughts on the matter. I'd like to hear people's opinions on the spam problem.
) but no seriously, i think that would be a good idea
and verify it there.
