- Impact
- 101
While the influx of spammers has been increasing for awhile, it seems to be getting out of hand lately.
For those wondering what I'm speaking of, the spammers are subtle. Their posts will kinda be on topic, but often are very terse / bot-like.
Adding a "no-follow" to links may help (though would hurt many legit users here, and potentially NP itself in SE rankings), but likely won't do much to stem the tide.
Disabling signatures for new users would be more effective, but even that has limits, since the spammers can easily just post links (even disabling that won't fully stop them, since some simply seek to boost ranking of select keywords / brand names) within the body of the message itself.
Bottom line is NP should, if the staff / mods don't already, regularly go through the new members signups and look for similarities / discrepancies (user names, locations, timezones, IP ranges, etc).
And strongly consider new user approval be done by manually several times per day in batches - some forum spammers can be snagged that way, and helps stem the tide.
Overall posting activity at NP may look fine, but take a closer look at who is posting what and the quality of the replies - as of now, overall, the forums are still very good, but there's a tipping point that NP seems to rapidly be approaching where the spammers effectively takeover pushing out many of the regulars who contribute much useful information that makes NP worthwhile visiting.
Ron
For those wondering what I'm speaking of, the spammers are subtle. Their posts will kinda be on topic, but often are very terse / bot-like.
Adding a "no-follow" to links may help (though would hurt many legit users here, and potentially NP itself in SE rankings), but likely won't do much to stem the tide.
Disabling signatures for new users would be more effective, but even that has limits, since the spammers can easily just post links (even disabling that won't fully stop them, since some simply seek to boost ranking of select keywords / brand names) within the body of the message itself.
Bottom line is NP should, if the staff / mods don't already, regularly go through the new members signups and look for similarities / discrepancies (user names, locations, timezones, IP ranges, etc).
And strongly consider new user approval be done by manually several times per day in batches - some forum spammers can be snagged that way, and helps stem the tide.
Overall posting activity at NP may look fine, but take a closer look at who is posting what and the quality of the replies - as of now, overall, the forums are still very good, but there's a tipping point that NP seems to rapidly be approaching where the spammers effectively takeover pushing out many of the regulars who contribute much useful information that makes NP worthwhile visiting.
Ron