The Forum comes equipped with antiSPAM measures. There are no antiSPAM measures on the planet that are reasonably effective but never interfere with legitimate user behavior. The options boil down to wide open or accepting some false positives as the cost of the average person being allowed on the internet in 1992 and the simultaneous development of SPAM.
One way SPAM disrupts a forum is automated bot SPAM, the other a human user who, typically, is logging onto hundreds of forums per week. That behavior is usually reflected by logging in and, within a few seconds pasting the full text of an article or even just a link, and moving on. Human spammers post topically consistent content of that type, then move to the next forum. It will NOT be obvious SPAM. Then, they do it again. On the premise of âsharing informationâ. Once theyâve built up a trust level and passed the basic moderation tests of an aged profile, multiple posts and/or comments, they circle back in a few weeks with more posting privileges and drop in a load of crap.
To thwart this behavior, the system is designed to throw a hold on users who post too quickly, too quickly after logging in, drop the text of whole articles in the Forum (instead of a link) or drop a link with no commentary. Itâs not a simple on/off switch. Itâs a threshold. Someone might post a link, no commentary, no point, just thrust a link in, and it sticks. Someone else might do it, and the systemâs algorithm thinks âpossible spammer, letâs place a hold on that postâ. Same person drops a 12 page article into a forum post (not a link) and the system thinks, âpossible defacer, letâs limit account privilegesâ. The system doesnât KNOW the person, canât make a more nuanced evaluation like âOh, thatâs Susan, and Susan is in all the vidchats and just doesnât talk much.â etc.
The reason youâre getting this information is so that you know how to avoid having a hold placed and having to open a support ticket for removal:
- If itâs just a URL, no commentary, no express point, and the system places a hold on that post, we ignore it. We donât go in and release the hold. If the user hasnât added some context - a remark or two - the link isnât very valuable anyway and doesnât justify the extra maintenance to make up for it.
- If itâs the full text of an article, from another accessible venue, itâs not really appropriate for the forum anyway. Best practice is to place a link to an external article and some commentary
- If the article is not available online to the average forum user, itâs best to quote/cite the relevant portions of the article. Alternately, the user can drop the article into any number of sharing mechanisms they control (Google Docs, Dropbox, etc) and share a public link (again with commentary). This way weâre also not doing an end-run around someone elseâs paywall, etc.
- Original articles: When the user is writing an article IN the forum. The system is designed to take that into account, based on the time it takes the user to type it in. If youâre utilizing the forum like a blog and writing and publishing an original article in it, the old fashioned way, it will usually go through just fine. If the user writes it in something else (e.g. Wordstar) and does a copy/paste to the forum, the system still might flag it as potential SPAM unless you slow down a bit, make some edits, add some commentary, or what have you.
The simple version is:
The system is designed to promote thoughtful commentary, which one generally doesnât get from spammers, so linger a moment and consider whether the post has adequate context.
A. Avoid just posting links with no commentary.
B. Avoid copy/pasting the full-text of articles and hitting publish.
C. Avoid 3-second replies (put some thought into it).
D. Avoid 3-second posts (it takes longer than that to type two sentences).
E. Avoid logging in and, within 3 seconds, hitting publish on something (the system thinks itâs mostly bots who can do that despite your impressive speed).
Again, if we have ANY controls for SPAM, there WILL be false positives. If we have NONE, the forum will quickly become unusable. So this is a guide for regulars who want to avoid holds placed on their posts etc, and newbies who donât want to be mistaken for trolls or spammers.