- Jul 1, 2001
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Have we ever thought of adding moderator approval to new user ID's to post? It might cut down on the amount of spam that we're getting in the forums like the ongoing General Hardware phone spam.
The primary purpose of these forums is to offer technical help and discussion (social forums are just gravy). That's not something we can do if registration requires human approval. Those users who are here looking for help are going to want to be able to register and post right away.
Not having been a mod I don't really know how much work getting rid of spam posts usually is, but deleting all threads for a known spam user sounds relatively easy as long as the forum software allows you to erase a user and all their threads at once.
The work to handle the spam seems to be less than the work required to manually approve every single new user. Instead of only having to intervene IF the account is a spammer, you'd be forcing the staff to intervene regardless of if it's a spammer or not. Sounds a lot worse than having a couple spam accounts every once in a while.
Plus what Virge said
Not having been a mod I don't really know how much work getting rid of spam posts usually is, but deleting all threads for a known spam user sounds relatively easy as long as the forum software allows you to erase a user and all their threads at once.
The work to handle the spam seems to be less than the work required to manually approve every single new user. Instead of only having to intervene IF the account is a spammer, you'd be forcing the staff to intervene regardless of if it's a spammer or not. Sounds a lot worse than having a couple spam accounts every once in a while.
Plus what Virge said
The bolded above, yes.