Some guy/spam bot keeps making new accounts to advertise windows in Cleveland with links in his signature presumably for Search Engine Optimization, e.g.
A rule that your signature can't contain links until you have been liked 10 times (or some other means of establishing legitimate presence) would perhaps be a way to alleviate this (or would we then get armies of spam bots liking each other's posts ). Is this change feasible, or perhaps it's more effort than continuing the status quo of users reporting and admins deleting the spam.
Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).
DrStraw wrote:Why allow links in signatures at all?
For example ez4u has a link to his Sensei's Library homepage which seems a fine usage to me. Or topazg links to his Go teaching website and OGS. Not the end of the world if they can't of course but equally the spam isn't so annoying (yet) I feel it justifies removing useful features.
This reminds me of the xkcd comic about checking for bots by seeing if they are capable of making constructive comments. The title text is: "And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ...oh."
Jokes aside, this kind of a system could work. There could be a few situations where it causes problems, but I can't think of many.
If I remember correctly, I once joined a forum where you needed to make a certain number of posts before you could have any signature at all. Newbies just had no signature, and I was fine with that. I don't know how easy such a change would be using this forum's platform, but I'd imagine it's possible.
"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves
I know vBulletin has some options for this, but don't know enough about phpBB to answer for this system. Would be interesting to see. If these options exist, I'd be all for making use of it.
Actually was a part of another forum community that had a small(ish) set of avatars, and you couldn't use your own custom avatar until you got to 5000 posts.
Edit - did some quick research, there is at least a basic amount of this management in place, but my fast searching only revealed info around giving access to different sub-forums. Didn't see anything right away about signature/avatar, etc. Didn't look too hard, though - so take it with a grain of salt.
Uberdude wrote:...Is this change feasible, or perhaps it's more effort than continuing the status quo of users reporting and admins deleting the spam.
It is certainly theoretically possible for someone who wants to go in and rewrite the code. But the users reporting works well right now. ( Thank, guys! ) So I'm inclined to leave well enough alone.
). Is this change feasible, or perhaps it's more effort than continuing the status quo of users reporting and admins deleting the spam.
