Weird Pm. Spam?

[truefusion 3]

You can do one more thing just don't let someone send PM until he have not posted some more than 4-5 posts(useful only) and they are not older than 2-3 days because as i saw these users have never send any post and have joined forum vary recently.

Now, wouldn't it just be easier to require a captcha in order to send PM's? Or disable PM's all together for members with 0 posts. Now I suppose both of those solutions could cause inconvenience to legitimate members, however so could having PHP automatically take some action against PM's with certain word phrasing in it.

In either case it would require writing a mod. If we disable PM ability until the member reaches a certain amount of posts, bearing knowledge of that, they'll just spam the forums until their PMs work. The unfortunate part is that we have to show people a message that they require a certain amount of posts before sending PMs, for actual, legitimate users should be informed about it, and it's impossible to determine who's legit and who isn't. And deleting their posts doesn't lower their post count (at least from what i've seen). Unless obvious, it is practically impossible to determine the intentions of those who spam the forum except that they want to spam the forum. Us moderators are capable of disabling their forum account for a period of time, but we wouldn't have much if any reason to do so if we only see spam in the forum and not PM boxes. Captcha won't work, as even in forums that use captcha for registering doesn't prevent spammers.

 

Although my idea does have its own complications, the rules it follows should be strict enough to not affect the majority of PMs. A legitimate member would have to hit all marks. I have a similar anti-spam filter for my website, which looks for certain patterns in the e-mail body. After applying it, i stopped receiving spam, but has not prevented me from sending mail to myself (for testing purposes, of course).

[Echo_of_thunder 1]

In either case it would require writing a mod. If we disable PM ability until the member reaches a certain amount of posts, bearing knowledge of that, they'll just spam the forums until their PMs work. The unfortunate part is that we have to show people a message that they require a certain amount of posts before sending PMs, for actual, legitimate users should be informed about it, and it's impossible to determine who's legit and who isn't. And deleting their posts doesn't lower their post count (at least from what i've seen). Unless obvious, it is practically impossible to determine the intentions of those who spam the forum except that they want to spam the forum. Us moderators are capable of disabling their forum account for a period of time, but we wouldn't have much if any reason to do so if we only see spam in the forum and not PM boxes. Captcha won't work, as even in forums that use captcha for registering doesn't prevent spammers.

 

Although my idea does have its own complications, the rules it follows should be strict enough to not affect the majority of PMs. A legitimate member would have to hit all marks. I have a similar anti-spam filter for my website, which looks for certain patterns in the e-mail body. After applying it, i stopped receiving spam, but has not prevented me from sending mail to myself (for testing purposes, of course).

In other words, It is just easiers and more simple to just report these spammers and have the Moderator and or Admin take care of them, than to spend a few hours of coding. I see your point.

[africa 0]

Well if it is any help at all. I have noticed with the three Spam PMs that I have gotten since joining is that 2 of the 3 have asked to reply to a yahoo address. could this be a autobot signing up to send these PM's? hard to really track down I know. I mean there programs out to change up the IP Address so you can't block them. and so simple to just make another E mail,

I don't know how many of these weird pms i have received!

On major socila networks i have had this kind of nonsense and if these guys are really getting something is a real wonder!

Most often they start responding to your emails if you reply to their yahoo address and what happens from there..I have no idea!

[galexcd 0]

Captcha won't work, as even in forums that use captcha for registering doesn't prevent spammers.

I wasn't talking about captcha's for registering. I'm fairly certain that most of these accounts are created by real people, and then use some creation of their own to send out massive amounts of PM's. If we put a captcha on the send private message page, there may be some improvement. Remember, most of these guys only need one account, so it is easy for a human to set it up, but you can only have one recipient per private message, and I doubt someone is going to sit at their computer copying captcha after captcha in for every board member they send their message to.