Is it really necessary to have a moderator review every single post? It slows down a discussion tremendously if you have to wait six hours or so before your message appears.

Why not just remove posts that aren't ok? With captchas at the registration, spamming from bots should be minimal anyway.

With captchas at the registration, spamming from bots should be minimal anyway.

I don't know about "bots", but there is nothing minimal about spamming! Well over half the messages I moderate are spam! I would estimate 70%, although I certainly can't speak for prkos and microUgly. MOST of the spamming is done by Guests or anonymous members. But I'd say a good 20 to 30% of it is done by bums to whom it is important enough to actually register. You would think they would not waste their time registering, but they do. And, if I'm not mistaken, even Guests or anonymous members must use captcha to post a message. The captcha, while it used to deter a lot of spam, now is no object for spammers Not even registration deters them.

I know, I agree with you. I hate having to wait for my message to be looked at by a moderator, before it appears on the forum (in other forums, not here). But if we let every message go through, the forum would, within just a few hours, be littered with offensive amouts of spam, not to mention offensive content. And it's my understanding that this is meant to be a family-oriented forum. My goodness, I'm shocked to learn how many graphic artists, serious graphic artists, are practicallly children...many of them literally are children! Personally, I would much rather put up with the delays, than be faced with even a little spam.

But not EVERY message is moderated before it's posted here at InkscapeForum.com. Only every message by Guest or anonymous members. For registered members, only their first 2 messages are moderated. After that, registered members' messages are posted immediately upon submission. I see that you have just passed this point, and now your messages will be seen immediately

I suppose we could eliminate Guest/anonymous posting. That would virtually eliminate wait times, after the first 2 messages. But that decision would be for the admins (microUgly, whom I expect will respond to this, before too long). If anyone else has strong opinions about this, pro or con, please feel free to reply. I'm sure micro wants to be responsive to the wants and needs of members and visitors alike, if possible. But he's no mind-reader, lol

I feel that MicroUgly and Bryn and PrKos and all the other moderators just do an amazing job of fielding the spam in this forum - i can't even remember the last time I even caught a glimpse of anything irrelevant or advertorial.
Nice work, mods!

Thanx druban

We had a period when there was no approval and the forum got bogged down with spam, it was almost posted faster than we could delete them.

We still get a lot of relevant anonymous posts so I vote against disabling that feature. Keeping the approval queue to two first posts seemed to provide the best spam control so far.

brynn wrote:For registered members, only their first 2 messages are moderated. After that, registered members' messages are posted immediately upon submission.

Are you sure it's two? When I made this topic it got through instantly, but it must have been my fourth post. I didn't quite know what to make of that, but thought that maybe the feedback section was exempt from approval.

Anyway, that the first few posts are moderated is acceptable. I just wish I had been told about it from the beginning, in large red letters.

Mazui wrote:Are you sure it's two? When I made this topic it got through instantly, but it must have been my fourth post.

It's two "approved" posts. So if your first few posts weren't yet approved, additional posts will also need to await moderation.

I know the moderation system sucks. I hate it myself because I don't get here often enough to let them through. It's only thanks to the hard work of prkos and byrnn that the delay is as short as it is now.

I also don't like to advertise the minimum number of posts before your account becomes unmoderated. The spammers aren't bots, they are people. And they are aware of how the system works. They will post the minimum number of posts to get their account unmoderated, then go back and edit their posts to include spam--it's not frequent, but common enough.

And whilst disallowing anon posts would reduce the amount of spam, I personally hate forums that force you to register to use them. I'm not interested in collecting user registration--especially when the user only hangs around for one post.

Ok. I didn't know they hired real people to spam now.

Just joined the forum. Why does every forum post need moderation! Surely this is a complete waste of time for everyone involved. It slows down user activity and wastes moderator time.

James

Welcome aboard James

As mentioned above:

brynn wrote:But not EVERY message is moderated before it's posted here at InkscapeForum.com. Only every message by Guest or anonymous members. For registered members, only their first 2 messages are moderated. After that, registered members' messages are posted immediately upon submission.

I see that this is your 4th message, so your messages will no longer be moderated, as long as you are logged in.

As a moderator, whose only job is to remove spam, and who volunteered to do it, I don't mind at all. To me, it's not a waste of time, when the result is a forum free from garbage. I think spam in the forum, especially unmitigated spam, would not only slow down user activity much more than moderating might, but probably repel new membership almost entirely. I don't think it would take more than a month after stopping moderation, before spam posts outnumbered legitimate ones.

I should maybe apologize for not being around the last couple of days. Most of the time I moderate several times a day. But I just had some "offline chores" to take care of yesterday and today. There are other moderators, but being the holiday season and all.....actually it's probably already Christmas Eve for some of our moderators and members already.

Happy Holidays!