Spam prevention

Nice idea. It can prevent autobots from spamming the forum. However, is it a bit difficult for newbies to ask for help?

True, there may be other ways of doing it. Although newbies generally make forum posts for the first 10 levels because normally they can not be asked to do it or even try and don’t understand how the Hackthis!! community works (i.e. no one is going to tell them the answer). Currently the resources available to solve the first 10 levels is huge. There are many previous forum posts and even online tutorials directly relating to the challenge levels on this site.

If the point requirement was set at the right value. Maybe 200-300 points (there may be a need for some experimentation here) it could solve a lot of issues. This may sound harsh but anyone who cant rack up 200 points on this site probably doesn’t deserve to post.

100 points is the total you get from completing the first 4 main levels. On top of that users may be awarded badges such as the bronze “cheese” badge you get for changing your profile picture (100 points) and possibly the bronze “visits” badge you gain from logging in every week. (100 points)

That is already a simple 300 points.

It may be possible to implement a ‘beginner’s corner’ set of boards which they can access but no other until the badge has been awarded.
Sounds like a plan to me.

Are we talking about automated spam or derpy posts? To repeat what I said in the previous thread before being deleted was that I don’t feel that we have an overwhelming amount of automated spam on this board … and to replace me clicking delete once a week with what will probably turn into quite a bit of extra development seems a bit overkill.

To answer your question. This should prevent automated spam and will not completely prevent; but hinder ‘derpy’ posts (so it really deals with both). I agree with the solution being overkill. However the site is getting more and more popular which will inevitably increase spam.

@Flabby: Regardless of whether or not this is necessary, if implemented do you believe it would be successful?

An alternative to help combat ‘derpy posts’ will be to have anyone with (hugely?) negative karma a set limit of messages per day. It will teach them to use them well because only by gaining upvotes on these will they regain their right to post more ‘fully’ to the site again.

Thoughts on this one?

It would be interesting to see what percentage of spammy/derpy posts have validated their email … that could be a nice simple way to weed some out. Although I guess it wouldn’t make any difference to bots.

@sabretooth that also could be a good idea, limiting posts seems a lot less harsh than just banning people outright. I would also be happy with the idea of limiting the number of posts new users can posts just not stopping them completely.

I personally feel any development time would be best spent in building a better moderator system into the site which would make on boarding new moderators a lot easier. Currently we only have a couple simply because the back-end systems are not robust/good enough to let anyone else loose on.

I was thinking of something similar to what sabre said. I think that we should still be able to award/deduct negative karma even if the post has been hidden because of negative karma. When a user has; lets say -6 karma (I believe that equates to two hidden posts). There ability to post is reduced to x amount of posts a day. Then once their karma has reached 0 again. Posting is fully enabled.

Also generically on all users a 5 minute interval between posts could be introduced. This should prevent botted spam very quickly.(although this may prove to be very annoying to legitimate posters.) Especially as i remember something to do with only 10 accounts being able to be made on the same IP (not sure where i read that but im sure it was from hackthis!!, correct me if i wrong.)

I think that the forums are not up to the same level as the rest of the site. Some major or minor improvements like these could be a big help to the moderation team especially as like flabby said there are only a few mods on the site.

Edit: Just noticed this entire thread is just made up of donators <3