Automatic screening?

Support & Feedback Forum
1

Is there any way to automatically check posts that are:

  • “from” Afghanistan
  • contain a URL w/in brackets <>
  • are the poster’s first post
  • are [usually] in Russian ?

The majority of spam that appears on the forum seems to match these criteria. I hesitated to mention it “publicly,” but as these are getting through, anyway, we won’t be any worse off discussing it. You gents do a good job pulling these w/in 12 hours or so, but perhaps you could shunt them aside to be checked before they are posted.

2

I hope it won’t cause a problem for people who are genuinely from Afghanistan.

Maybe just having new members first post moderated would stop these spammers from signing up.

3

@Ernie, JerseyMark,

Thanks for the suggestions. We are looking into how to prevent different forms of abuse on the system including forum spam. We have a number of options we are exploring.

4

Thanks, Mark. It can be lived with of course, but the spam is annoying.

5

Apropos new forms, any thoughts about the new domain endings and the problems they could cause (I am asking in a general way, not LingQ specific)?

6