I hate to suggest on a limit on the freedom provided by the forums, but the amount of spam is getting ridiculous. Here’s my suggestions:
A new account must post 10 times before they are able to create a new topic.
A new account can must be at least 10 days old before it can create a new topic.
The idea is that in topic spam is much less annoying than new topic spam. With this method there should be plenty of time for the mods to act against spam accounts (as long as everyone keeps reporting) before they are able to create a new topic.
I think this is a decent enough idea, actually. Not just to stop spam, but also to get people to use the forum a little before they start making new threads.
There are quite a lot of new threads which, if I’m not mistaken, come from first-time posters asking questions which have already been asked and answered many times over. If they aren’t able to post a new thread without first taking part in at least one existing one then we might cut down on that a lot. After all, if they can’t post a new thread and are looking for the answer to a question, the search function may indeed be the first thing they go to…
With that in mind, I’d be happy with a 0 day and 3 or 5 post minimum. I think that’d achieve 90% of the goal with minimum impact on new members.
I agree, and I’ll add – somewhat obviously – that none of the first ten posts can be in any way against the rules and regulations and should be in some way constructive. If a post is reported, it should restart the number if posts needed.
Well I’d welcome a means to prevent the spamming seen on Unity forums, the suggestion unfortunately wont work.
The spammers will simply generate several accounts every few days, make half-hearted posts, maybe even just copy paste from other replies and just wait ten days to get around the restrictions.
Of course you might argue that both of these could be monitored and thus close their account, but you’re just adding much more work for the mods. In the meantime threads will gain pointless replies, which now doubt others will reply to, so what are the mods meant to do then? Delete the original pointless reply, leaving a weird gap in the ‘conversation’, delete all posts related to the pointless one? It will quickly cause more problems than simply letting the spammers make spam threads and having the mods delete the entire thread (which also keeps things clean and tidy).
Secondly the suggestion causes problems for genuine new members or perhaps people who lose access to an existing account. Forcing them to wait x days before posting a thread which is the most likely reason they’ve come to the forum will be hugely counter-productive.
One alternative option might be to increase the number of support mods, giving them the ability to move threads into a ‘blackhole’, so official mods can run a daily check on them, ensuring that no-one is going beyond their bounds. That avoids having to wait for offical mods to remove the more obvious spam threads we’ve been getting, whilst maintaining control over the power of authorised moderators.
The forum software already auto-moderates topics from new users that contain links…sometimes. (There’s a fair amount of spam you never see.) What I’d prefer is that the forum should always auto-moderate topics from new users (say, < 20 approved posts) that contain links, and also prevent new users from being able to use the edit feature to add links in later. Spammers sometimes post stuff without links, but usually not, so I’d consider the stuff that gets through to be a minor nuisance.
It’s not a problem or a restriction to post links, it’s just that the topics are auto-moderated–and it’s not an idea, it’s what already happens now (but not always, as I mentioned above). Meaning mods can see them but you can’t. If it’s not spam, then it’s approved. New users who post links not getting their topics posted immediately is a small tradeoff for significantly reduced spam.
Yeah. What if someone without an account has a question, and goes through the trouble of making an account to ask us something… only to find out he can’t because he’s new? That’s not very welcoming to new users
I think I’ve seen some spam threads recently, but they are very few and they disappear quickly, don’t they?
I honestly haven’t seen spam as a problem here either. I think these forms are very well moderated. The only time I generally see spam is in areas such as the third party tools section and the showcase your work section. People tend to comment on one or two other topics (or ask generic questions) and then create posts that are obvious shilling for specific products rather than true genuine reviews. The problem with limiting the ability to create new topics is that there are new users who have genuine questions and being new, don’t have a lot to contribute back to the community. I know because I’m in that same situation. I’m still learning a lot about Unity but as a seasoned .NET developer I try to contribute to scripting / programming questions.
As for duplicate topics… this is an age old problem that plagues every support / community forum and it’s not going to go away no matter how hard we try.
One thing that would be nice though is a “Report as spam” feature to mark something for review. Someone just posted this Spam topic in the Unity Support section (needs to be removed ASAP):
See the little triangle with the exclamation mark beneath your name, location and post count on your post, that is the ‘report post’ button, where you can give details as to why you are reporting the post (spam or whatever).
The post you refer to is just the standard spam threads that get started, normally a few a day (at least in the gossip section). They are generally easy to spot, so easy that you don’t even bother clicking through to read the post, unless you want to help out the mods and click on the report post button.
Seriously I don’t think the levels of spam are that big an issue currently, at least what gets through the automated systems and certainly not enough to penalise new users preventing them from making a thread until they have been a member for 10 days or made 10 posts. Its counter-productive and wouldn’t actually reduce the spam levels at all.
Been reporting any that I find. And they are appearing in a lot of the forum sections.
Ya the worst like others have said is for them to start jumping in threads and spamming. Or necro old posts to spam in.
I have to disagree with that. It’s not a current problem as our beloved “asdf-spammer” seems to prefer creating new topics instead of posting in existing ones. However I imagine it to be equally annoying if random threads would be resurrected with such spam.
I don’t know how the report spam button works under the hood, but if a post gets tagged let’s say 5 times it should be automatically hidden until it is approved again by a moderator . This number could be set dynamically dependent on the total number of posts of a user. Maybe it would be fair to inform the user with a PM in this case .
Also the “Report Post” button could be made more prominent or even a second button “Report Spam” could be added which implements such behaviour and only requires a single click to report the post without having to add a description.
Im not too fond of that idea, then you just end up with more “spam” of people trying to get their post count up so they can start a thread. If people are forced to make posts, many of them will not be high quality posts that add to the discussion.
Though it will encourage them to at least look at other threads before registering and creating right away a “is unity right for me / my project” or “I’m new, what do I do?” with their first post. A threshold of 10 posts seems pretty reasonable.
