I wanted to run something by the general forum public before I went ahead and implemented it, partially for feedback and partially as a notice about the general situation. If you hadn't noticed, we've had a bit of a spam problem for the last several months. While I'm sure many of you have noticed spam posts showing up occasionally, the issue has been much more problematic than you probably realize. The total number of bots that have attempted to hit the forums over the past few months is in excess of 50 million. At one point we were getting approximately 1.3 million spambot registration attempts every day. We've adapted our protection over time to combat this influx and as of a few weeks ago I believe we finally stopped all fully automated bots from registering on the forum. I believe that all of the spam you are seeing now is by spam accounts which were created with human assistance. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about spammers who use humans to bypass our security system. Some of those spammers will always get through on any forum that does not pre-screen every single registration attempt, and that's not really an option for the Org for many reasons.
A pattern I have noticed in the spam posts that are still getting through is that they immediately post links in their posts, pretty much always to pirated movies of some kind. As a result, I have proposed to the staff that we add on a new level of protection that prevents newly registered members from posting links in their first X posts (I have suggested X = 3). I'm not sure how well this will work, but I believe it is worth a try. However, this does somewhat revert Org's policy on new member posting freedom which we've been opening up ever since we abolished the Junior Member system many years ago. As such, I want to get some opinions and commentary on this situation before I go any further. Please let me know what you think of this proposal.
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