FORUM: Posting Queue

PeterJones

Unfortunately, spammers are getting more aggressive. In the past, I had done all I could with the “nice” settings to prevent spam, trying to limit links and similar… But a recent batch of spam was all a similar kind that couldn’t be prevented by the passive anti-spam.

As a result, I have had to turn on a “posting queue” – new users’ posts will go into a queue, and one of the moderators or admins will have to manually approve each new post. Unfortunately, there are too few active moderators and admins, and we cannot guarantee 24/7 coverage for post approval, so it may be several hours between when you post and when your post appears. As soon as you earn enough “reputation” (upvotes), you will no longer have to wait for your posts to be approved for them to show up.

Hopefully, this will be temporary, but for now, new users will have to wait for approval before their posts show up. Sorry.

update: when a new user tries to write post, they will see a message in the middle of the post-typing section:

guy038

Hello, @peterjones and All,

As I still have admin rights and have an Admin icon, when I open my N++ Community tab, I was able to have a look to the NodeBB Post Queue.

Right now, it contains five posts, which all seem to be spam posts as they mainly refer to the same topics of the previous banned posts !

So, Peter, do you want me to help you by watching, from time to time, to this Post Queue ?

And, regarding these 5 pending posts, do you mind if I, myself, click on the red REJECT button ?

May be, this is not enough and there should be supplementary steps to completely ban these accounts. Just tell me about it, possibly by e-mail if you prefer !

Best Regards,

guy038

P.S. :

Also, what if a new user would, for example, registrer, on our forum, with the Ggf Ifd name, which is one of these five pseudo-posts to ban ?

donho

@PeterJones

Nice done - I think it’s the best we can do.
I’ll check the forum as often as possible to approve/reject the posts.

PeterJones

@guy038 ,

My procedure has been:

if it’s not spam-like,
- accept it
If it is spam-like,
- ban the user (duration=0 to make it permanent)
- reject the post in the queue

A ban prevents them from posting, but doesn’t delete the account, so it also prevents anyone else from creating an account with the same name, and from creating a new account using the same google account for logging in.

@donho ,

Thanks for adding @Terry-R to the moderators – that will significantly improve the time-zone coverage. And thanks to @Terry-R for volunteering. :-)

Even after just one day with the new system, it’s been a lot more manageable than the weekend was, because the same spammer isn’t able to make dozens of posts before a moderator logs in to put a stop to it, and there’s a lot less cleanup work.

guy038

Hello, @peter-jones and All,

Ah…, Peter, too bad. You already deleted those 5 spammers. I just wanted to “get the hang of it”, reject them and banish them, myself, once and for all! !

Anyway, I suppose, unfortunately, that this list will contain other spam users before long and that I’ll be able to exercise my moderator’s rights at that point !

BR

guy038

guy038

Hi, @peterjones, and All,

Today, while looking to the Post Queue, at three different times, I successively got :

Two spam posts, the first time : I reject them both but I forgot to ban their accounts, first ! Sorry :-))
One spam post, the second time : I did ban this acount permanently and reject the post
One regular post, the third time : I immediately accepted this post, which is, BTW, the second post of this user !

BR

guy038

PeterJones

@guy038 said in FORUM: Posting Queue:

which is, BTW, the second post of this user

The NodeBB-software’s decision as to whether or not to require the post-queue is based on the reputation of the user, not based on the number of posts the user has made. If they still have 0 or negative reputation, their posts will still go into the queue, rather than being posted immediately.

donho

@PeterJones said in FORUM: Posting Queue:

A ban prevents them from posting, but doesn’t delete the account, so it also prevents anyone else from creating an account with the same name, and from creating a new account using the same google account for logging in.

Indeed, that’s the guideline that I always follow.
OTOH, I wonder if it’s necessary to keep the rejected posts unpurged?
If there’s no reason to keep them, I’ll purge them as I see ones.

PeterJones

@donho ,

Makes sense.

Since deleting posts was tedious for me, I had recently been looking into whether I could use the API that the forum offers to write a script to automate some of the cleanup (like with purging the deleted posts/topics), but that will take some time to develop.

update: As of Nov 9, the purge automation is working, and it will run once a week. (Along with purging deleted posts/topics, it will also delete user accounts that are more than a year old where the user never posted and never logged in after the first day – nearly half of the 30000 accounts were in this category)