[Anti-spam Suggestion] Forbid newbies to post URL's

[bob123]

I am not sure I agree with the idea of limiting thousands of newbies because of the activities if a few.
Posting phishing or scammy links I believe would get your account nuked, and users are actively involved in cleaning up the forum these days by reporting such posts.

The thing is, that people are creating hundreds of accounts just to spam their link once per account.
They don't care if they get nuked. The whole purpose of those accounts is to get nuked after spamming their link.

Reviewing posts from newbies is a better suggestion, this would effectively eliminate spamming and those who break rules can be banned without their posts being made public.

Reviewing posts probably isn't possible with that much new posts daily.
Mods are already having a hard time moderating the rest of the topics. Additional reviewing wouldn't be practically doable.

Such restriction would hurt legitimate newbies who came here to announce their services for example. Ok, they can purchase Copper Membership? Yes, they can, but do you expect that many of such users will do that? I don't think that we should make forum not friendly to new users.

The majority of 'service announcements' from newbies are simply scam. Everyone who has a LEGIT business/service, would be ready to pay a buck for copper OR simply get 1 merit.



As writing this, new spammy site is being spammed:

Investments with maximum payback: 180% profitability, contribution for 3 months, deposit from $ 30. Interesting? Learn more! https://[SPAM]/?ref=DaeJ]

[Steamtyme]

I was 100% for this yesterday, with no restrictions.

Then I did realize that in the Mining section a lot of newbies need to be able to post a link to imgur or something of the sorts so people can assist them with troubleshooting. Even though it would also be helpful in the reputation section - I think it shoul d be blanketed accross the forum, or those sections will become the targets for the spam waves.

So I'd be all for links to be unclickable - and have a tag along side it [Disabled link from New member, proceed with caution]


Adding to that the warning message could link to t athread some fine member of the community can create regarding safe practices with links.

[Blanca_Gregory]

If spam is the issue, then why not ban the website they're linking it to? Or, if they're doing it repeatedly, then just ban them altogether? No better way to keep the forum out of spammers than to filter and restrict their posts and/or ban them from the forum, right?

Probably because there are multiple new websites created daily which are then spammed here across unrelated threads.
I think it would be way more effort to ban each site, than to simply restrict newbies from posting URL's. But both is a good approach.

It would. I mean, filtering out some phrases should teach spammers a lesson. Just looking at the list of the websites OP shared, it would be helpful to ban that particular website, or at least certain phrases that they keep on using. They'll eventually find another way to spam, but that should keep the forum spam-free for a while.

[manfredmann]

IMO there is no necessity for a newbie (who didn't even receive 1 merit) to post any URL.

This is a discrimination against to all newbie who were just starting up and learning in this forum. Of course newbie could barely get a merit because of the nature that they were new and still learning in this forum (unless if they were just spamming). There is no need for this to do to all newbies out there. This will limit them also to express their thoughts that could be back up by URL links to their claim.

OP you were just generalizing all the newbie. I know that you were after for the good of forum yet instead of scrutinizing the newbies here in the forum, we should welcome them. Sooner or later newbies could contribute brilliant ideas that could be a highly valuable input for the forum.

Besides the merit system introduce to jr. member rank requirement was effective in reducing spam posts.

[AicecreaME]

This is easier said than done. Spammers would just post ‘bitcointalk dot org’ instead of a actual link and search engines would still pick up the text of the link. The underlying reason why these spammers post these links isn’t to get forum users to click on them, it is to get search engines to recognize that bitcointalk has the link displayed on one (many) of its pages which helps the search engine rankings for the link.

A better solution would be to configure the robots.txt to somehow get search engines to not pick up posts by newbies that are not at least xx hours old. This would give mods time to remove the posts before search engines can pick up the links, and reduce the effectiveness of this spamming strategy to near zero.

The best idea so far and that is what I am thinking also, though it might be hard to make an algorithm for that certain program to minimize spam post made mostly by newbies in this forum, but for sure it is worth it and will surely eradicate spam posters. I'm looking forward on making that happen soon or maybe in the near future.