New system to eliminate spam and improve quality

[Adam]

Despite having an industry state-of-art Captcha system and email confirmation process, spammers still got through and abused our forum with increasing intensity.

Today, to prevent spam, we implemented a new system!

Here is what was done to the forum:

- Removed captcha for registration
- Ability to view all forums as Guest
- Guest and registered users have identical permissions (READ ONLY)
- Added a new 'Jammers' group to the forum
- The Jammers group can reply to and post new topics to the forum
- There is an authorization page which will get you in to the Jammers group once you can confirm that you are a Jamit user

For users with more than one post on the system, I've added you to the Jammers group automatically! New registrations will need to complete the authorization process after they register.

I hope that this change won't inconvenience you too much. I've made the registration process easier, and hopefully this will eliminate our spam problem for good. Fingers crossed!

[CompuDave]

Excellent - Will be good to have a spam free forum. Thanks!

[Imran]

Yes it is a good feature, but it will limit no. of non jamit users from interacting with other members before buying/pre sales...

[Adam]

Yes, there's a trade-off unfortunately, but better than shutting this forum down. Spam was a serious problem on this forum and it was a hassle to clean it every day. I have tried captcha, email validation, application firewall, banning ip addresses (which Peter sent me a huge list every day) and none of this worked.

Perhaps another way we can authorize users to be able to post is if we can confirm that they have a twitter account / facebook / linked in account with at least x number of friends or connections. Although, there are still lots of spammers fake accounts... perhaps give them accesses to a limited set of forums...