[Solved] New poster alert - possible delays ahead

[SlySven]

At the present we are in the cross-hairs of several spam bots that are throwing all sorts of messages at us - and as my Russian and Polish (most of them seem to be in those language but not all) is non-existent I have to check them to be sure I am not throwing out a genuine new user who is not a native English writer.

This means that the checking and approving process for new user's first posts is taking a bit longer than normal - if you can make the title of new posts more obviously Mudlet specific e.g. "Why doesn't stopStopWatch() stop the stopWatch?" rather than "My Mudlet is broken" it will be easier for me or another Moderator/Administrator to pick the gems out of the s**t that is currently impacting on the rotating air movement device...

Edit: Phew - I have just had to trawl through ~150 first posts that have cropped up in just a couple of days - to throw away ~149 of them - so the situation is not easing up yet. Please can any first posters write the title of their message in ENGLISH - otherwise it is likely to get discarded in the first pass of cleaning up initial submissions, and try to be specific about a Mudlet topic as it may not make it through the second otherwise...!

[mobgamegraph]

Well this is definitely a good information since my post also was deleted.

[SlySven]

No - it just didn't get manually approved when I first saw it!

The OP in the topic it was on had been identified as a spambot and subsequently banned, and your message content was a single sentence that did not seem to add anything to the topic. I felt a second opinion was needed but before one was obtained your second post (above) suggested that you might be a human and not a bot spouting short innocuous sentences to get past the initial approval before filling the forum with spam for pornographic material (or drugs that might help someone to appear in such if they were genuine and legal - both the drugs and the material!)

Unfortunately such things do exist and it is a chore to clean up afterwards. * sigh *

[mobgamegraph]

Yes i am definitely 100 pecent human, I was registered to this forum to get more knowledge about mudlet,or even i can get help to the other member or even i can provide a little help from the new comers from your fantastic forum. Anyway thank you for a very well explained and yet i do really understand the rules to block the spambot and maintain the sites clean.

[agda]

It might be a good idea to check username, ip and emails, for new users against a spam database, e.g.
http://www.stopforumspam.com/usage. It will not catch them all, but some will be catched.

[SlySven]

For those cases where it is boarder-line whether the poster is genuine or not I have done that, but ideally we would want it to be automated into the process which is not within my bailiwick. As it stands I can ban such members which prevents them subsequently overloading the queue of "members" waiting to get full access with their "first" post (last week I had one that had posted 60 such first posts in little over 5 days) but that is reactive rather than proactive and does not stop another name from the same IP address (which might be a Tor exit/VPN node anyhow). It needs further steps to clear out the massive number of (now banned) Bots from the "members list" but that is not a trivial undertaking if we want to be sure we do not accidentally remove real people rather than bots.

[Vadi]

If you are experiencing delays or your post got accidentally disapproved, come join us on Discord (https://discord.gg/kuYvMQ9), there's at least no spambots overrunning that place.

[SlySven]

Might be worth noting if you have not spotted the slight visual clues : that we have finally got things more up to date in the underlying forum system and the registration process - so things should be a lot smoother all around and for the moderators/admins (yep, I got me a promotion too ) things look to be a lot better as we should (touch fibrous vegetable matter) have a lot less messages involving sex/dodgy pharmaceuticals/pirated films or ways to spam forums to get our product/URLs onto Search Engine listings {yes - some spam bots spam forums about software to spam forums }

Big thanks - hugs etc. to TheFae who has put in a lot of the work to get the shiny new stuff in place.