Make any thread title with a URL in it need automatic human approval

[Master Disaster]

Is it possible to make any thread where the title contains a URL need human approval before going live?

 

I honestly don't see any legitimate reason why a normal user would put a URL in the thread title.

 

I'm not familiar with the moderation abilities of IPB but if it has a moderation queue function then doing this would stop a good chunk of bot spam from ever being posted.

[manikyath]

it seems like an interesting idea.. if possible.

 

that said, if a spammer notices that, wont they just make threads with the link somewhere in the body of the post?

[Ankh Tech]

3 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Is it possible to make any thread where the title contains a URL need human approval before going live?

 

I honestly don't see any legitimate reason why a normal user would put a URL in the thread title.

 

I'm not familiar with the moderation abilities of IPB but if it has a moderation queue function then doing this would stop a good chunk of bot spam from ever being posted.

maybe, using coding to look for http/s or www. in a title, then stopping it from going live, then a human can approve

[Ankh Tech]

Just now, manikyath said:

it seems like an interesting idea.. if possible.

 

that said, if a spammer notices that, wont they just make threads with the link somewhere in the body of the post?

well, they might check the whole thread text, which will be really annoying to normal people asking about a product, or they could make it so that if it is something like amazon, they could allow it

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

it seems like an interesting idea.. if possible.

 

that said, if a spammer notices that, wont they just make threads with the link somewhere in the body of the post?

Yeah but thing thing with a bot is it doesn't really know if its post actually went live or not, it just sends the request to add the data then moves on.

 

It wouldn't work for bots that post URLs in the main body but those exist already.

[Master Disaster]

2 minutes ago, Ankh Tech said:

well, they might check the whole thread text, which will be really annoying to normal people asking about a product, or they could make it so that if it is something like amazon, they could allow it

That wouldn't be a good idea. A very large amount of posts have very legitimate reasons to post links, images, youtube embeds, twitter embeds, builds, PCPP links, shopping links, software links, heck Tech Reviews REQUIRE you to post a link. The mods would be swamped with approvals and would have no time to actually mod.

 

But there's no need to ever put a URL in a thread title.

[Kilrah]

I've never seen that type of spam here, only in the body and usually using the popular "cloaking" techniques...

[LogicalDrm]

The current system uses keywords in combination of other factors. I'm fairly sure the issue with this (and why its not implemented yet) lies in how forum software works. As in Status Updates, threads and posts are treated as equals. So forcing just links at start of those, even with just threads and SUs, would mean a lot of false positives.

 

So please just keep reporting and we will improve things based on those.

[colonel_mortis]

The base forum software is fairly limited in its tools to do things like that (although we do have several pages worth of blacklisted phrases). It does make sense to filter out URLs in titles though, and it something that I've been planning to do something custom about for a while.

[Wheresmehammer]

Wait there are humans in this place?

[WhitetailAni]

I thought everyone else was an AI that we were training.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

3 hours ago, ragnarok0273 said:

I thought everyone else was an AI that we were training.

Tay Bot nooo!