Suggestion - new member - no posting for 48 hours - two posts in 24 hour period

Given the rash of spam posting, there needs to be a "cooling off" period for new members.

• No posts within 48 hours of joining (e.g. cannot reply to any thread)
• No more than two posts in a 24 hour period for the first 30 days
• No classified posts for the first 30 days and without less than 10 posts.
• Account deleted if no activity with 96 hours of sign up.
• No starting a new thread for the first 10 days and without less than 10 posts. (Added Shane's suggestion)

Allen Sanderson wrote:

Given the rash of spam posting, there needs to be a "cooling off" period for new members.

• No posts within 48 hours of joining
• No more than two posts in a 24 hour period for the first 30 days
• No classified posts for the first 30 days and without less than 10 posts.
• Account deleted if no activity with 96 hours of sign up.

Not bad, but IMO the second point is far too restrictive and will inhibit new legit users. Remember, we're fighting robots here, not real people.

I think the real solution is a simple spam filter on topics like email servers have had for decades. 

In reality though, there probably aren't enough people working on MP to address the issue and the manual flagging posts as spam is working well enough.

There should be a simple question on the sign up form that needs to be answered correctly:

Gates In or Gates Out?

That should solve 99% of the problem. 

All of you have been missing out on some incredible deals 

Temu can wait 48 hours before another post-dump. Or wait a month, whatever. Its a bot, anyway. Once they crack the door open, they're in.

Sysadmin, where are you???

Why is it that long-time members can’t post more than three times per day in their own thread, but a brand new user can make 15+ new threads in an hour? The screenshot only captures half of the spam posts. Also, I thought it used to be the case that if someone flagged a post by a brand new account, the posts (and offending account) were immediately taken down without the need for further review. I flagged multiple, but they remained visible afterwards.

If this was an intentional change to the policy/code that is letting these spam posts stick around until being reviewed (rather than some sort of hacking that is preventing them from being taken down), maybe it would be best to reverse that for the time being? If there is concern that some non-bot accounts are being flagged, maybe hide them until they are reviewed, and bring them back if a review finds that they were wrongly or erroneously flagged. Or at least hide/delete them after that get flagged by multiple users. I understand it may be hard to weed out the more sophisticated bots using Chat-GPT to at least try to blend in, but it seems like there should be a simple way to weed out these obvious ones. 

Any white hat hackers out there who could go after whoever is behind this godawful wall of spam? Any update from Admins on how the fight is going? I assume the breach will be fixed at some point, but it sure makes you want to track down the spammers and take them out behind the woodshed. 

In the past I have seen forums with limitations to new users similar to what is being suggested. One thing I have not seen is disallowing new topics until a user has a certain number of likes on their comments. It doesn't need to be too high, maybe 10 likes?

Shane F wrote:

In the past I have seen forums with limitations to new users similar to what is being suggested. One thing I have not seen is disallowing new topics until a user has a certain number of likes on their comments. It doesn't need to be too high, maybe 10 likes?

Pretty sure I don't have enough likes; however, this should be posted to the new topic: "How to Kill a Forum"

Maybe it could be sticky on all the topics?

After a few days of manually managing this recent run of spam accounts that are getting through, we've made some initial adjustments that should provide some relief and we will continue to monitor and adapt to quash the annoying bot campaigns.

MP Moderators wrote:

After a few days of manually managing this recent run of spam accounts that are getting through, we've made some initial adjustments that should provide some relief and we will continue to monitor and adapt to quash the annoying bot campaigns.

It did not work:

Same same old shit different day.