Welcoming genuine forum posters quickly - but turning away off topic advertisers
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2014-11-16 09:14:08 - Graham Ellis
Running a forum such as the First Great Western Coffee Shop - a public facing site for passengers (and wannabe passengers) on train services in the Thames Valley, Wessex, South Wales and the South West of England - brings in around 70 pubicly posted messages a day. Such messages are the lifeblood of the forum, and we have a large number of members, with many more viewing as guests; we believe that people come and read the site to find out about what's going on in the area, and to get answers to rail and area related questions which are otherwise hard to come by.
With our open door policy of welcoming anyone who has something to say in our speciallity area, a typical sign up request will be from someone we don't know - after all, there are millions of journeys made on First Great Western trains each year, but our membership is only around 1,600 / readership around 11,000 different people in any month. Alas, that significant readership attarcts a large number of requests to sign up from people who want to use us as a platform to advertise their products, services, scams and opinions which are well outside our areas of interest.
We have automated tools which help us categorise signups - a "three star" signup results in an email to the admin team so that we can do a quick visual check and approve most genuine newcomers quickly. "Two star" signup requests get logged and the admin team checks on them on a regular basis; less that two stars, and take a quick look every couple of days just to see if anything useful may have appeared there, but the zero star category goes further and actually bans further signup requests from that source. I'm not totally telling you how we do it (in case this is read by people who want to sign up to advertise something off topic), but I will comment that there is good co-operation between forum operators so that intelligence is shared automaticlly; "forum spammers" as they are known will cheerfully adverstise their wares on just about any site where they can find a platform.
We're so well set up to cope with these things these days that the daily effort isn't huge, and indeed some of the user names and email addresses used help to create a light amusement. From this morning ... "Skinny Grape 415", "Nauseating Dinnex", "Saphire Moot", "minor.feamail.com", "spamavert.com" and "bigdresses.pw" ... I particularly admire the cheek of the person looking to sign up to spam post the forum with a "spamavert" email address. Yeah, right ;-)