Spam on the forums

[Gerzer]

Too much spam! We really need some way to regulate spam. I don't think anyone cares if it's back-end code that analyzes posts or a team of forum moderators from the community or what. Does anyone have any ideas?

[georg.viehoever]

Another idea: Let your users mark spam, and remove recent messages from the user who sent the spam until the moderator determines what should happen. This should enable a rapid response.
Georg

[omz]

Is the system in place yet? Another load of spam just came in.

I haven't deployed the change yet, though the code is mostly done.

[Gerzer]

@omz Great!

[Gerzer]

Is it just me, or are the spam floods coming more often than before? We just received a new one about 15 minutes ago. :(

[omz]

I'll try to deploy the change a little later today. There might be some downtime.

[omz]

Okay, the new moderation requirement should be up and running now.

New accounts are now "untrusted" by default, and their posts won't show up publicly. All existing accounts are already "trusted", so it's theoretically possible that there are "sleeper" spammers, but I don't think that will be a big problem (most previous spam was from new accounts).

I've also taken the opportunity to make the font a little more readable.

[techteej]

@omz I like the new font, but you might want to change the weight - you can't really tell which post titles are bolded.

Also, having the ability to delete posts would be useful in the future :)

[dgelessus]

def make_more_readable(html):
    return u"<b>" + html + u"</b>"

No offense, but that was my first impression. The font itself is nice, but it really looks like all text is in bold.

[Gerzer]

I agree with @techteej and @dgelessus, but we may just be splitting hairs, I don't know. Anyway, I'm glad you were able to implement the changes, thanks. Also, I like that you increased the number of posts on the homepage from six to eight (including both apps). :)