Should new members have their initial posts screened before publishing

One of my pet peeves about BabyPips is how many marketers come here advertising (directly and indirectly). For the old timers they are easy to spot. New members, no introduction and from the word go they push a product/service.

One method other forums use to eliminate this filth is to screen those initial posts. I feel this could be a useful tactic here. Keen to hear others thoughts.

That would help, undoubtedly, but it’s also perhaps somewhat labour-intensive.

Two other possibilities (both of which I’ve already suggested privately, at length and in detail, to the forum’s staff, but so far to no avail) are …

(i) Having some “old-timer” moderators or assistant moderators who can “soft-delete” such posts when they’re made (i.e. transfer them into a hidden folder, for review when convenient, by admin staff) - clearly the forum could benefit greatly from this, and there’s absolutely no risk or downside at all with it, from the forum’s perspective;

(ii) Have admin-activated profiles instead of member-activated: this involves not activating new members’ profiles until they’ve exchanged one email with the forum’s staff. The outgoing email from the staff is of course pre-written and automated, and comprises a “welcome email” with a link to the forum’s rules, requesting people to reply very briefly, [I]confirming that the rules suit them[/I], before their profile’s activated. I’ve seen this idea working [B][U]very[/U][/B] successfully indeed. It doesn’t just filter out the undesirables: [U]it actively encourages participation[/U] by members who want a “better forum environment” and want to contribute to that, rather than being driven away - as so many are - by the converse. I know it sounds like it wouldn’t stop all the spam, but in practice it gets rid of at least 95% of it, because people who wanted to join to post spam realise right away that this isn’t a forum where they can get away with it (and of course it loses all the bots and automated spammers, as well). This would also be trivially easy to do, as the forum is already sending new members an email on which they have to click a link anyway.

Sadly, it seems that none of the above suggestions - yours or mine - are welcome.

Hello bobbillbrowne,

This actually already happens, and has been going on for years. All new members go through a moderation period where all posts up to a threshold scanned by a third party anti-spam management service called Akismet. We’ve used it for many years to combat spam in our Blog comments, and it has worked well. It definitely worked against the registration bots that were a problem for some time, but many dedicated spammers have stuck around to engage enough cleanly to meet those thresholds before starting their spamming campaigns.

We also limit adding links and images to new members until they’ve posted a certain amount of times (not including Introduce Yourself posts).

So I would say that we’re doing a couple things initially with new signups to keep the marketers away, but it’s not a perfect solution. It’s constant monitoring. We try to balance the ease of signing up and participating with other members quickly, against being too strict and making the signup and time-to-first -post unbearably slow that the new members just leaves.

Thanks,

Pipstradamus