Can Vanilla do this?
FredAt
New
Hello All,
I set up a forum recently for a new product/service. I erred on the side of prudence and subjected every post to approval. Just as well. For every genuine post I had 50+ spam posts. That perhaps is something I have to live with. However, what got to me was how difficult the forum software I had chosen made it for me to administer the forum. Amongst the things I could not do
a. Set it up to automatically reject posts containing certain words - based on my experience thus far words I would like to use to automatically block messages include: anything to do with medicines, prescription drugs, dating/mating sites, any mention of money etc.
b. Bulk select a whole lot of spammy messages for deletion - every single message I had to delete required 5 clicks!
In the end I was obliged to suspend all new posts/memberships to the forum and cast around for an alternative. My researches have turned up vanilla and it sounds good. However, before I take the plunge I would like to establish if Vanilla comes with tool that make it easier to administer spam and to silently suppress posts that contain one or more words/phrases from my own defined list.
I'd be most grateful for any help and feedback on this.
Answers
The admin features for moderation are in their infancy, however there are plugins for bulk deletion (warning do not use minifier plugins, as they can corrupt these an other addons).
There are plugins that connect to akismet and stopforumspam, this is good for stopping common automated spam. If you don't mind the overhead (It should be tolerable on a small forum with a slower pace).
These won't stop non automated, spam, semi-automated spam, or lesser known targeted spam.
Doing you own heuristics, is pretty advanced subject, if you want stop words, they you will need to develop that plugin. You are probably going to want to try and mitigate false positives, especially for seasoned users.
You can search on here for 'botstop' for solutions, for preventing bot applications.
grep is your friend.
If I can add my own experience I had a project over-run with spam using another Forum software. While @x00 is right to say there is work to do on bulk moderation, I saw a dramatic decrease in spam using Vanilla and the BotStop addon: http://vanillaforums.org/addon/botstop-plugin. I highly recommend it.
Thank you!
I second with x00 on this. Vanila provides various plugins for different features.