Great forum feature which could reduce SPAM

[Gambi]

Ironically, this may sound like SPAM itself, but I assure you it isn't. :p

So I was thinking about how people tend to become trolls when registering to a forum, and in some cases their first post can be there last. Then you get your SPAM bots who do nothing but post then never return.

Well, I was thinking about the feature that allows the admin to enable an account before that member can actually do anything. I always thought it was a pretty useless feature unless you didn't want members at the moment as you were still setting up the board or something. Well, in a similar case, I have an idea which would bring more use to that and possibly bring a stop to the first posts by users that pretty much reflect the person they are.

What happens is, once they have registered, nothing will seem different to them. If they post a topic, to them it will have appeared but to everybody else nothing can be seen, apart from the admin or moderator who have to activate the message just like activating a user. Depending on the what the topic is, if it's help or just a simple 'Hello' message, the message will be activated along with the account. If it is SPAM, then you see where I'm going at. The message is gone and the user is banned.

This could prevent anything bad being spotted by the public, of course we'll probably only frown once in a while but you do get the very bad or just plain annoying first posts. Of course, everyone will have seen it and if it's a family forum and somebody has posted porn or anything else similar to that matter then it won't look good on your part. I think it is the key to stopping SPAM on forums and is pretty much one tick and that's it.

Sure, they could get around it by posting an innocent message than something bad but either they'll be sad enough to do something like that or not bother. And with the SPAM bots, they'll just post once and that's most likely it.

It did seem like a simple idea so I wouldn't be surprised if this feature already exists, but being nothing but an ameteur when it comes to programming, I thought someone who is interested could make this mod. It may look pretty difficult but I'm sure something like this could be possible. And I chose SMF as it is the best forum software I have ever worked with and something like this would gain more interest.

Good idea, or not? I'm interested to know. Thanks for reading!

[dcmouser]

I think it's a great idea, and it would be very useful to be able to put members (new members by default) into a member group where there posts wouldnt be seen until they were "approved" by an admin.

[digithead]

Did anything ever come of this?  I just had my FIRST Spam post in one of the forum sites I host. Some bozo in Switzerland went thru the trouble of self-activating an account and then posted an article about "enlargement" (if you catch my drift)... I'd like to figure out a way to prevent this... or perhaps use a method already setup that actually works. I really don't want to lock things down so that user accounts must ALL be approved by me but if that's what it comes down to I guess I'd have no choice.  ?

[青山 素子]

User moderation (possibly including this) will be in 2.0 by default.

Until then, you could look at some possible solutions such as limiting new member posts to a specific board until they post enough.