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

[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.