Phew. Can we please get rid of that forced moderation for new members' posts?

[Harry Kuhman]

I moderated this site heavily in the days before new members posts were moderated before being approved. This change has been a huge help, not just for the moderators but for all users. I used to see all kinds of problem, including imbedded porn images and links to malware and other infections. The problems were so bad that I had software on my personal systems that would check the board for new posts every few minutes and alert me so that I could get this type of material removed quickly.

If new members are frustrated that they can't post and immediately get an answer to their question, just ask yourself if the problem that you are posting about is something that hasn't been asked and answered over and over again. Perhaps doing a simpler search for an answer or reading a FAQ would get you your answer quicker, and you might learn other useful things about Knoppix at the same time. I never thought about it before, but maybe the moderation delay for new members is also helping limit the number of posts of the type that say "I'm not going to put the effort into reading the instructions, just tell how to ...".

I would suggest that anyone not happy about the new member moderation delay get over it. You shouldn't expect a quick concise response in less time than it would take to read the instructions, and it may be good that the first posts are slowed by moderation. But the moderation is pretty fast on this site (I've been finding fewer and fewer posts to moderate myself as the other moderators get to most before I ever catch them, none again today) and there is very little legitimacy in complaints about it. And the alternative would be so much junk posted that the person that just might help you is discouraged from wading through it all to find your request.

Understand too that the people most likely to help you with any legitimate problem are not slowed down at all by this feature. The moderators are the active members that solve many (if not most) problems. And they can see your post immediately, even if the general public can't. And the moderation features forces it to their attention and forces it to be read, so it will not be ignored even if it has a title that a moderator would overlook because it looks like other posts he has seen, imparts no real information, or is simply about a subject that the moderator isn't interested in. The moderation delay may get you your answer faster and from someone less likely to give bad information.

As to links, I would like to see them disallowed completely. There is too much potential for abuse, including completely changing the target of the link after moderation. Whenever I see a link, even if it looks legitimate, it is a red flag to me to pay extra attention to the post, and track down just who this new member is, what other sites he posts on, check for spam history on his IP address as well as his email address, and so on. Complaining about not being able to post links makes the flag even redder.

[terapin]

<snip>
As to links, I would like to see them disallowed completely. There is too much potential for abuse, including completely changing the target of the link after moderation. Whenever I see a link, even if it looks legitimate, it is a red flag to me to pay extra attention to the post, and track down just who this new member is, what other sites he posts on, check for spam history on his IP address as well as his email address, and so on. Complaining about not being able to post links makes the flag even redder.

aren't spam posts pretty obvious.

if a post is so badly written that you think it might be spam with a spam link, but you're not sure because it looks legit too, then why not check the link?

somebody complaining about not being able to post a link shouldn't in itself be a red flag. If they eloquently explain their
problem and it looks legit but they complain that they can't post a link, and a link would help them explain their problem, then it doesn't sound that suspicious.

have you ever had a spammer complain that he can't post a link.. and say you then say it's not clear why he needs the link, does he then respond with a very convincing explanation and a link to a very legit looking website? Mostly you just need to look at the link or hover over it, to see it is spam.

On a related note. 10+ years ago I knew spammers would eventually figure out that their spam would be more likely to be opened if they put 're...' in the subject. Unfortunately they started doing that, but it's still easy to see that it is spam.

[Harry Kuhman]

aren't spam posts pretty obvious.

Most are. And there are many clues, including bad grammar (I'm not going to list all of the clues here, for reasons that should be clear.) But lots of members here don't have English as a first language, and even of those who do, many wasted their taxpayer funded education and are barely literate enough to post. So grammar isn't an adequate indication of spammers.

But while most spammers are easy to spot, there are devious spammers out there. I've caught people come back and edit a perfectly acceptable post to include spam after the post was moderated. This happened on the old forum software and there are now checks in place to hopefully catch it.

I even had a case where someone was praising a boot-able Linux on Flash-drive release and suggesting it was so good that he sent the author extra money. I made an off-hand comment that this sounded like hype, and he responded so aggressively denying the implication that I looked into it further, even though I had not be inclined to at first when I saw the previous post. What I learned was that there were three members here all singing the praise and wonders of that flash-drive, including him. They posted back and forth discussing it. And they all posted from the same IP address (even though they claimed to be from different countries), an address that I was able to trace back to the seller of the Linux flash-drive software. I had seen those threads before, but they looked sincere enough to not raise suspicion. It was only after the spammer had pushed his luck and became rude about my questioning his legitimacy that I looked into it enough to find reason to remove his false and misleading spam posts.

We have learned a lot in fighting spam. We have tools that let us check a lot of things about a new member. Some of it is automated and comes into play automatically by the forum software, some still comes down to a human effort. Back in the days before Clinton took over the site, the previous owner EADZ wanted everyone to be able to post immediately without moderation. The problems were major. I wrote software to analyze the logs, and we could see that there were a hundred or more new spammer sign-ups for every legitimate user sign-up. Many accounts were never used, many were allowed to age for weeks or months before the spammer came back and started posting. We also had a lot of problems with real damage done to both the forums and the wiki by spammers; in some cases information was completely lost and Eadz couldn't recover it even from the backups.

The current system is a good system. Users who think that their extremely important posts are being delayed for a few minutes or even a hour or two might be better served by using that time to see if their question hasn't been asked and answered many times before. But in any case the people who are best qualified to see you post and help resolve it will see it as soon as they long in, simply because the moderation process requires them to see it.

[Clinton]

aren't spam posts pretty obvious.

You've got no idea!

The current system is a good system.

Thank you, Harry, that means a lot to me. I remember how much we discussed the spam problem and the should we/shouldn't we move to a new system and all the backups of "bad" email addresses and "bad" IPs we took and all the other stress we - mainly you - handled.

Everyone else, you'll just have to trust me on this, every single one of the current restrictions is there for a very good reason and has been put in place because we've figured out over the years many of the tricks spammers use. Most spammers are idiots and give themselves away easily. Others are a lot smarter, a lot more devious and sneak in promotion of their websites, or link drops, in very cunning ways - hidden text with links, white text, punctuation marks with links etc. are the EASY ones to spot!

I appreciate some restrictions imposed by what is, after all, an automated system can be frustrating but as the person who has first hand experience of the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of spam messages we've deleted, the thousands of suspect IPs we kept tracking, the thousands of hours Harry spent cleaning the site of spam, I'm very satisfied that we've got a good balance of minimum disruption to genuine users while keeping spam at bay so the site is clean for YOU to use (without having to trawl through a lot of junk to get at the information you need).

For every post you see in public there are more than a hundred (spam posts) that have been blocked by the system! Anyone who wants to volunteer to clean that spam manually is welcome to PM me with their proposal to lift any of the current restrictions.