New idea to reduce spammers

Are IP bans out of the question?

Are IP bans out of the question?

I believe there are ways around this which the spammers use

Too easy to change IP and too likely to accidentally ban people who happen to end up with a banned IP one day.

How about key word filtering? Much like the swear filter does, but it puts questionable threads into another section for the mods to approve. The spam ones would be pretty easy to pick up.

Or temp ban people for making too many threads in a specified period of time.

1. Already exists, but it's computationally expensive and the problem gets worse the more words or phrases you add so it's very hard to make it watertight

2. There's already the minimum time between posts, as well as temp banning IP addresses with too many newly registered accounts in a short period of time. Something like making you wait x minutes between creating threads might work but only for the spammers who create new threads rather than posting in existing ones

Has it been tried?

It would certainly help with the dupe issues.

New members not being allowed to post a thread for x days after joining would fix it, no?

Allow them to post replies to existing threads, just not create their own.

Would also have the benefit of not having multiple threads asking the same questions - New users would actually go search for the answers.

Around things like uni applications etc, which a lot of members join for, this wouldn't really work, would it? It would also defeat the purpose of Introduce Yourself, if no one new could make threads there.

Again, you're not stopping them from posting, just from creating new threads.

The introduce me forum could have a single thread that everybody uses to say hi - other forums do that.

Questions around applications can still be asked and, again, how many truly new questions does TSR actually get? I'd bet that 99.99999999...% of all the questions prospective students ask have been asked before; there's no reason why they can't search for and then use pre-existing threads to ask their repeat questions.

From my experience in the careers area I know that the overwhelming majority of questions we get ate ones that we always get.

This one small change wouldn't change anything.

It doesn't even need to be long, just a day would be enough to stop bots.

Hence the comment about uni applications rather than general posts - they're often circumstance specific, or worth having their own thread regardless

New members not being allowed to post a thread for x days after joining would fix it, no?

Allow them to post replies to existing threads, just not create their own.

Would also have the benefit of not having multiple threads asking the same questions - New users would actually go search for the answers.

Unfortunately you're relying on people not having the attention span of a gnat, once people realised they had to wait x days to post a thread a lot would just bugger off never to return. Someone in the company would almost certainly veto the idea on the grounds of putting too many potential new users off.

Why not have Drewski's idea - but rather than just saying "you can't post a new thread <angry face>" let users create their thread with title/content and when they hit the "post thread" button they get a choice