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quick posting

ToivoToivo New
edited August 2006 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
User registration has its up & downside. I have been thinking how to make posting easy &spam free -anyone could post -for posting you need to fill the "name" and "email" fields (if you are not logged in) -post it - blurry part of this idea. Email account is checked if this is real & working or fictional (could be checked as "email recieved"?) If fictional, then post is not published -it could be more easy this way: post is published, shows up in a moderation queue that eliminates spam user will get email that he\she has registered a name in this forum "if you want to use it in the future click to confirm" and automatic passw is generated How to make posting more easy? Is there something like this in other forums or blogs?

Comments

  • KrakKrak New
    You are assigning rules to being able to post without registration. But if your going to go through the trouble of emailing people, or make them fill out their name and email...why not just make them register? This doesn't make sense to me.

    If they obviously can't be bothered to fill out a simple freaking form to register, then what makes you think they would fill out a form to post? Is this not one and the same? Registering is one extra field.

    IMO the only anonymous posting would be that, anonymous. If you have to fill anything out, I mean anything, other than the post, then just freaking register. Is it really that difficult?

    I don't mean to shoot your ideas down, just saying what I think on the subject.

    You could perhaps make all posts anonymous, or I guess just fill out a name, then have them go into queue, to be checked and approved by a moderator. But that puts a lot of work on the mod. Then he would also have ultimate power over the direction the board takes. I can't think of a way to make a forum allow anonymous posting and be spam free.
  • ercatliercatli ✭
    I'm interested in the ideas. If you have a big forum which is pretty busy, then I reckon registration is necessary, and people will be happy to do it because they want to join. But if you have a small forum, especially a new one, and you're struggling to get people to post and get things going, then registration may be a barrier. In that case, manual vetting of posts by the mod may be quite a small workload. So I wonder whether voluntary registration early on and see how it goes might be acceptable. Which of course, doesn't require any programming, we can do it now. As a matter of improving my current ignorance about spamming ("we hates nasty evil spammers, don't we precious!?"), is it common on forums (or would it be if there wasn't registration)? Is it automated or manual? Does even the simplest form of registration foil automated spamming?
  • KrakKrak New
    I wouldn't think a forum that had no users, or is not highly well known would have a problem with spam. Usually only sites that are linked to from a lot of other sites, or that have a large amount of traffic get hit with spam.

    How would a spammer hit up your forum if no one knows about it. And if a spammer did find it by chance, do you think he would really spam it to death if there were only 2 users? I wouldn't think so. But I could be wrong.

    I wouldn't mind having the ability to post without registering, but thats not what I was getting at. I was merely saying why have it so you don't have to register to post, but... you have to enter your name and email to post. That seems to be more of a hassle than actually registering. Not to mention that registering is only 1 more extra field to fill out, then they would never have to enter the info again. It just didn't make sense to me. Thats all.
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    I wouldn't think a forum that had no users, or is not highly well known would have a problem with spam.

    Just playing devil's advocate, but 90% of the time spammers aren't people. They are programs. A spambot won't care how many people are on a forum or how busy it is. If it finds a link to a form where it can submit a message, it is going to use it over and over again. Without question.
  • WandererWanderer
     Quote: Mark  Just playing devil's advocate, but 90% of the time spammers aren't people. They are programs. A spambot won't care how many people are on a forum or how busy it is. If it finds a link to a form where it can submit a message, it is going to use it over and over again. Without question.
    Yes, that's right, I had a couple of spambots flood my guestbook with 5-10 messages a day. I simply added a required "This is not SPAM" checkbox on the form, it stopped them dead in their tracks because the form could not be sent without checking this box. Recently, one bypassed the checkbox and got through but changing its name to simply "Not SPAM" did the trick again. Every month or so now, I modify the name of the checkbox slightly, nothing has gotten through since.
  • ToivoToivo New
    edited August 2006
    "You are assigning rules to being able to post without registration. But if your going to go through the trouble of emailing people, or make them fill out their name and email...why not just make them register? This doesn't make sense to me." I just looked how wordpress does it. For the comments it saves user name and email in a cookie? But storing passw-s in a cookie? Not a good option I guess. "I wouldn't think a forum that had no users, or is not highly well known would have a problem with spam. Usually only sites that are linked to from a lot of other sites, or that have a large amount of traffic get hit with spam." It depends on the incoming links and rank on the search engine but even small site could get visited by a spambot. These are not very choosy.
  • bmeltonbmelton
    Here's a relatively easy-ish way to handle this: - Require an email address to make a post - Send user an email to 'confirm' comment, email would contain one-off auth-code tied to their email address - Hold post in queue - Promote post to the page whenever user confirms
  • ToivoToivo New
    edited August 2006
    I was thinking this way "Comment author must have a previously approved comment" - Require an email address to make a post - check if the name is not used by somebody else - Send user an email to 'confirm' comment, - Hold post in queue (for the *firsttimers*) - promote the post But it still needs spam filter or some clever question (what is the color of this word? How much is 7x4?)
This discussion has been closed.