A thought on spammy posts

Of all the forums I belong to, this one without a doubt has the strongest anti-spam policy - which I agree completely with.

Having another such post today got me wondering if leaving the thread and original post while deleting the content of the post is enough. The one today that Tim/venture snipped still has the OP's signature and webdigity is providing the fellow 2 backlinks.

Can the signatures be removed? Seems like with the really bad offenders this should be the case. Or maybe have a post restriction before someone can use a signature? The one today is showing only 4.

Well, just a thought. Am I being too harsh?

I don't think there is a strong anti spam policy here particularly, though we are pretty quick to remove spam messages, regarding signatures I remember nik mentioning he had no follows in place but I did a quick check and they are not.

I don't expect its possible but a nice implmentation would be 1-10 no signature 10-25 no-follow on signatures  25+ full links
though not sure if its possible to code such a thing in.

mind you most spammers are repeat offenders and get banned quickly, depending on the case by case basis I tend to PM the offender and suggest behaviour modification, though I think in many cases Nik just bans them :)

Spammers better stay away from my blog, I have spam protection on. Same goes for my forums, which I visit every day...

Nathan P.

It looks like I forgot to post in this thread before :)

In general I want a free community and I think all of us do. With that in mind I don't really have any problem to see someone posting a link on a relevant topic. Of course some people think we are idiots, so we have to remove some posts or even ban some people.

Right now the signatures are visible only to guests, and this will probably remain this way as sigs may impact the site's SERPs (I am not sure for that, but I think it is true)

I think the only thing we could code, as the super anti spam protection is a post count based permission to post active links. For example before your 10th post you can't post a link. But the problem with that is that can destruct people from being active to the forum.

What you fellas think about that?

I don't think that's needed, Indeed I campaigned against a removal of similar rule in other forums, I also think its better to reward good behaviour then punish bad.

Is it not possible to stop people having signatures until their tenth post?
also could it be edited so that people over say 20 posts signatures are shown to the outside world. It would have minimal impact on webdigity SERPs results but would reward regular commenters with a back link?

Anything ideas would be welcome, especially if they were portable to vBulletin and thus my company's forum :D .

i like what tim said about reward those deserving with live backlinks (with follow tags) and punish the offenders.

I will try this sig thing. It requires some work, so I will have to find some free time to code this.

Thanks for your opinions :)

You can have my opinion anytime, Nikolas!

I like this Idea too, maybe you can create a relation to webdigity  money amount:

< 100 webdigity $: no signature
> 250 webdigity $: signature is visible to guests

members have to pay to remove the "nofollow" attribute (maybe 1000 webdigity $ a month?)

That would be much more difficult to code, plus it would be very complicated for the user...

The number of postings is OK too ;)

Look, that was my idea to promote the forum shop as well (looks like the shop is closed since a year) ;D

That's because the shop made people spam us. My final conclusion was that if there is any motivation to post in the forum (besides the fun, or the response, or the community in general) makes people spam.

I remember a member who started posting articles from article directories to earn enough points to buy some advertisement :)

I remember him too :D