Sandy, UT
Quoted from vid1900:It's not like anyone is going to die if a few spammers and a few friendless misfits make some unwanted posts.
Robin can just give the mods a bigger hammer and sooner or later the misfits will run out of steam.
I was an admin on a fairly large vBulletin site (500K registered users; 50K active) once upon a time. "Steam" from these "misfits" might be underestimated.
Spammers are endless; people write spambot programs that will sign up to a bulletin board and wait before posting. The same spambot might sign in to the same spamming account over a months time and finally drop its load.
What worked best was to allow all posting; but to only make new users visible to moderators as well as their threads and posts. If a moderator determined that the post / thread was legit, they would remove it from a queue and verify the user. It didn't stop the idiot contingent from posting; but it prevented them getting what they wanted, which was eyeballs on their links or their shenanigans.
A "new user" would automatically be moved into the "visible users" group 1 month after their first post, or after their 10th post. It makes sense that the moderating staff would be able to weed out the riff-raff in that time.
Usually, surprisingly, the spambots could be traced to either a single ip or an IP range. We would check to make sure no legitimate users were on that IP range before banning the range.
You might say "if you ban a range that someday might block a legit user", that's a big "IF". There are 4 billion different ip4 IPs on the planet. It's doubtful that all 4 billion of them (or even a significant part of them) will ever want to sign up here.
