Okay, lately, I've felt like the forum has been getting bombed with drive-by "Review My Website" and "Link Exchange Wanted" posts. So starting right now, there is a policy regarding how many total posts you need in order to create such a thread (if you do not fall within the minimum post requirements, the thread will be deleted): http://forums.digitalpoint.com/faq.php?faq=dp_faq#faq_posting_guidelines It's nothing outrageous, just to prevent people from posting those threads and nothing else. - Shawn
Hi Shawn, Your policies are very liberal. One thing I have noticed on different fora are the hit and begones. Answer my question, give me some free advice and cya, sometimes not even pausing to say thank you. If they want to studylurking is great. Many times newbies are afraid or sceptical about asking questions, but what they do not realize is their perspective can often shed new light on a subject.
Well I don't mind people coming for help, then never returning. It's just the "Review My Website" or "Link Exchange Offered" posts that I'm going to require some actual contribution to the forum first.
Good restrictions- it should help limit much of the problem, but then give you more work at the same time. I feel for you Shawn.
Actually, I'm lazy, so I set it up to be automatic. If you have less than 10 posts, you can't post in the Website Reviews forum. If you have less than 25, you can't post in the buy/sell/trade forum. I'm also trying to eliminate signature drive-by spam, so you need at least 10 posts before your signature will be active.
Can I sell my posts to all the wannabe drive by violaters? Let's see 550 posts divided by 10 at $100 per free entry. Geez that $5,500. I knew there had to be a way to make money from these forums. On a more serious note I haven't found it outrageous to date, but your rules are very reasonable. I just hate rules
It's not outrageous at this point, but it's definitely steadily increasing, so might as well nip it at the bud. As far as the "rules", none of them apply to anyone over 25 posts, so you don't have to worry. And it's all automatic, so I don't have to remember to do anything or police it.
The policy stuff aside, you can really do some neat things with the promotion manager in vBulletin. For example, you could set it up so users could only do things (which can be anything) after they are a user for a certain number of days (I'm just doing it based on number of posts). You can also do things based on the reputation system. So you could have a "members only" forum that can only be accessed based on the reputation level that other users give them.
I see red when I read a post I view as pure span. Just found a guestbook one of my clilents has been spammed. I have changed my robots.txt file in hopes of nipping guestbook spamming in the bud. Shannon
I set my forum up so a member needs at least 10 posts before they appear in the guestbook. They may register and never come back anyway, but at least I'm not giving them a link.
I've been looking for a way to do this. if you come across something and don't mind please let me know. I actually posted the question of how to do this in another forum but have yet to receive a response.
I did it with different internal user groups, then the used the Promotions section to auto-promote people.
Hi Shannon, Smart move.Guest book spamming was prevelent a few years ago, but there are still some holdovers looking for an easy link. It became so bad we took down all our guest books and now simply use testimonial pages.
Okay, it turned out it was too much work trying to enforce the signature thing, because people with less than 10 posts, would put a signature in the body of their message. So to eliminate my need for policing, you need 10 posts in order to have a live link in your message.
That seems to be a decent way to solve it, only thing I fear of this new rule is people posting gibberish posts to get past the min.
Had a little annoyance where the system would automatically parse URLs to make them clickable by default. So if they put a URL (without making it live), the system would make it clickable, then give an error if they had less than 10 posts. So now, if you have 10 or less posts, the ability to auto-parse URLs, is gone.
Ok, so if the problem is then that the spammers come and do the 10 posts of gibberish what then? Perhaps it would be that they then don't come back, so do you think it would be easy enough that, for example, they had been in for 10 days and averaged 1 post/day and then they went away for 10 days on the 11th day when they hadn't returned and the average had dropped to 50% that the auto-parse is taken away, or, their posts are hibernated [hidden] until they return [unhibernated] and post up to an average that you can set [and not tell] when it returns the auto-parse?