Community Moderated Banning (anti-Spammer)

[merm]

Greetings,

I have a pretty well behaved group of community members that frequent my board. Occasionally we get a spammer that registers with a bot, or even manually and then publishes some link to porn or something. Most of the time they use a vaild .ru email address.

I'd love to see a way that users could click an icon and flag a message as "spam," which would then notify a moderator, admin, or maybe even after a certian number of flags ban the user automatically.

Is there such a feature, or does this sound like a useful feature?

I like the idea of self-moderated forums quite a bit.

[Thantos]

I'd love to see a way that users could click an icon and flag a message as "spam," which would then notify a moderator, admin

"Report to moderator"

I suppose you could add on a warning count to the user and when they recieve a certain number of warnings via the report to moderator it puts them on a 24 hour ban.

[merm]

I'm not familiar with how the "warning count" works. Is this a mod or a built in feature. I can't seem to find it if it's built in.

[Thantos]

Its not built in, nor is it presently a mod.  Just giving a way it could be done

[merm]

For now I'll take advantage of the "notify moderator" link, but hope there's the ability to add such a community flagging feature in the future.

[gri]

I like the idea of self-moderated forums quite a bit.

merm,
What do you mean by "self-moderated" ?

[Trekkie101]

I like the idea of self-moderated forums quite a bit.

merm,
What do you mean by "self-moderated" ?

Gri,

www.digg.com is an example

The members can select "flags" or words about the topic such as "spam" and it will be automatically deleted without a moderator needing to be present.

[Grudge]

I've made this suggestion before and I think it's a very nice idea. I'd like to try add the option for this into SMF in the future, but I'm really not sure how many people would use it. I'd have options such as:

Number of reports before deleting a post [ ]
Number of reports of a user in a 12 hour period before banning user and deleting all posts made in period [ ]
Weight user reports dependant on post count/karma [ ]

Where deleting would actually been "unapproving" in the SMF 1.2 world

If the weighting box was checked (Checkbox), it would weight a report based on the number of posts/karma someone has made, or the amount of time they've been registered. The longer you've been part of the community the more weight your reports carry.

[gri]

I like the idea of self-moderated forums quite a bit.

merm,
What do you mean by "self-moderated" ?

Gri,

www.digg.com is an example

The members can select "flags" or words about the topic
such as "spam" and it will be automatically deleted
without a moderator needing to be present.

Trekkie101,
            don't you see the danger ?
            Still do not you feel yourself
                  to be a victim of moderation ?

Will _IT_ be Deleted ??
~Without moderation~

           Then where will the Human Being
                flagged and spammed by monkeys
                      be launched to ?

         Whom the left users will talk with ?

And about a what ?

About how to count
          how many monkeys have gathered on a forum
                       to vote for others' karma ?

[merm]

You bring up a good point; that there's a potential for abuse using this model.

However, it could be ideal in a forum where people respect each other. And of course if you made the settings so that it was reasonable it would take several people to mark it as spam.

Craigslist is a great example of how this works. People can flag as duplicate or spam.

[Col]

I'm sure Grudge would intend for the posts to be recyclable, but yes, it could possibly be used against a forum. The problem for the trouble maker would be that they would have to take the long view, and spend a long time being "good". I suppose a more likely scenario is that a "good" member goes "bad" because of some argument. I suppose the risk, though, is not much greater than you having a renegade moderator.

I still like my idea (and I will keep pushing for it in appropriate threads ), of using, so called, "intelligent filtering" techniques:

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=58223.0

Also, another recent topic asking for pre-moderated posting:

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=58766.0

I think there are quite a lot of people that would like some form of moderation that does rely upon a "Moderator" having to be there.

[merm]

I don't think anyone is talking about getting rid of moderators altogether. It's just that when someone comes on your board and starts spamming it's nice to have a way for the community to flag those and have the user temporarily "muted" or temporarily banned (for say 24 hours) once a certian number of flags come in.

On my board people are only using the "report to moderator" function when I get a spammer, or when someone is very vulgar. I don't think it would be abused on my board.