Cooldown Between Posts to Prevent Spam

[bellabichon]

Like any popular internet environment, this forum deals with spam. It usually comes in two forms here:

1. People posting and reposting their topic in multiple subforums, in an attempt to generate engagement.
2. Bot accounts spamming the same post over and over to sell something/infect your computer with viruses etc.

Because of this, it's interesting to me that the forum doesn't have some sort of cooldown between posts. On Reddit, for example, if your comment karma on any subreddit is negative, you will have to wait for a 10-minute cooldown between comments. There's no upvote or downvote function on the forum, but I think a cooldown between posts (not comments) would be useful. There could be an exception for important accounts (forum mods, LTT staff, etc) but I don't see many reasons why the average user would need to make multiple new posts within 5 or 10 minutes, except if they were spamming.

[pythonmegapixel]

The actual spammers seem to fall into 3 main categories:

• Malicious intent. These people create accounts - quite possibly bot ones - to make one thread shilling their BS moisturising cream or weight loss product or essential oils, then abandon the account. A cooldown is not going to stop these people and they're generally shut down within half an hour or so by the mods anyway
   
• Don't know better. These people are simply unaware of the forum etiquette and think that they should create their thread in multiple forums because it doesn't fit into a single category. This could be better solved by some kind of onboarding procedure which informs people of the etiquette. Once they are told by a mod, they won't do it again.
   
• Just want exposure. These people just want their stuff seen. More often than not they seem to comment on existing threads in addition to creating possibly a single new thread. So it wouldn't stop them either.

 

So, to conclude (TL:DR), there is only one category of spam that this measure would stop at all, and that is the category that is most easily stopped by simply telling them, something which this forum frankly does an atrocious job of. So in my opinion, it's not worth it for all the irritation it will cause to legit users.

 

Alternatively, why not introduce this measure, but have a cutoff for it to be disabled. It would seem reasonable to me that once someone along the lines of a reputation score of 10, 50 posts and have been a member for 2 weeks (just numbers I plucked from thin air for illustration purposes) they are probably a legit user who knows the place well enough to know the etiquette, so it would be reasonable to disable the restriction at that point.

[colonel_mortis]

There is a rate limit on posts, and it does slow down the most prolific offenders. However, we can't limit posts and topics separately, and there are definitely legitimate reasons to want to make multiple posts within a few minutes.

 

The majority of spam that gets posted on the forum is the only post made by that account, so rate limiting won't help there. The majority of the spam is caught before it gets posted at all, and we are looking at ways to catch even more - adding a rate limit could be part of it, but it would only be a very small part of the solution.

[LogicalDrm]

1. Amount of these is rather low daily/weekly. Maybe 1-2/day at most. You can help us catch these by reporting anything suspicious (including posts that have very similar content, but different poster).

 

2. Amount of these that you get to see is also rather low. And like Mortis said, we are improving on them constantly. I for example ban 3x-5x the amount of spammers from filter vs the ones that actually get through. And seeing what the content of those getting through is, its really hard to make filters any tighter without significant impact to general users.