Last night I attempted to reply to a post in the Mises Institute vs. Cato Institute thread and received a message that my post needed to be approved. I am not a new member but it may have something to do with the fact that I reformatted my computer??? Perhaps I was recognized as a new user? In any case the post has not yet been approved. If there is a reason it has not yet been approved I would appreciate knowing it. It if is just because of my computer being reformatted that is one thing. I hope there is not another reason.
Can we please call a moritorium on conspiracy theories about unapproved posts? This is nearly always–like 99.99% of the time–a software issue. Tons of spam floats around the web, and there is no way admins can personally deal with it all. We have to rely on spam checks, and these are not perfect. Please be patient with the system. By the way, this is true of the main blog too. Every few days I receive a flaming email from somehow whose post was tagged as spam. This is completely unnecessary.
Since users need to register before posting, can the filtering done at that level ? If only legitimate users join the forum, then no filtering of individual messages is needed ?
So that’s why, I was wondering. I posted a comment in the Nader thread that had links to the anti-war candidates of the Libertarian and Constitution Party’s websites.
The thing to remember about computers is that they do what they are told to do and what they are told to do may not be what you want it to do.
A busy database will put transactions into a queue if they cannot be handled right away. So posts by other users, blog updates, spamming attempts and other actions will count as a transaction. If a transaction is put into a queue the database will give a message to that effect and this bit of software converted that message into a notice about a post needing to be moderated, since that is likely the only message it had available to use.
You’re right about transactions, but wrong about the message to the users. If it says your post was moderated, then it was moderated. Unmoderated posts will generally show up right away.
What about this : You don’t filter any messages, but let us users report posts as spam. Now, when somebody post a message wich is spam his account (and messages) can be deleted. I don’t think that a spammer would join the forum, discuss some economics for a while, and then start spamming ?
edit : Messages are filtered for new users. Let’s say a user joins and posts for a week and his messages don’t trigger the filter. And so you can whitelist him. If after a week he turns to be a spammer (as reported by the rest of users), you can delete his account.
I run a travel forum and have since 2004…and you would be amazed at the tenacity of some spammers. Most are just spam-bots that sell the two P’s. Some start out generating a random topic and sell nothing. Sometimes that topic hits on something appropriate to the forum and is left alone or even answered by yet another spam-bot…then one month later you wake up and “blammo” your forum is filled with spam from a previous user.
Some also crawl the user names and try to guess simple passwords to make a previous legitimate account become a spamming account. These are rare though but the annoyance they cause when they get through is enough to justify precautions.
So use a quality captcha, like recaptcha, to block out spambots at registration time, and have a few moderators plus a posting delay (5-30 seconds between each post, depending on how new the poster is to the board, should work) to handle anyone who tries to post spam manually. If some spam gets through and a mod doesn’t catch it, anyone who comes across it can use the “report abuse” link for the post to report it.
EDIT: Am I alone in finding it ironic that a guilty until proven innocent approach is used here?
Well, I’ve not been asked to join. The application, I believe, consists in writing a few editorials for the New York Times that take a social-democratic perspective.
Yes, this bot has been designed to post 250+ on-topic replies. At that point, it will begin to enter anti-spam discussions and subtlety plug pharmaceutical products.
