http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php/218314-How-to-STOP-Spam-Bots-!!

The Image recognition would be the most simple – ie to post you must type in what is presented in the image. Allot of sites use these and people are used to them.

Registration and user registration authorisation would help but would require administration of the site.

What is your hosting platform? What software are you using?

actually, I am referring to THIS site… the ITKE site.

I was just trying to start a discussion if others are noticing this, and what we want to put up with in order to prevent it.

Hi Melanie

I realize you have a hard task, and was not trying to complain, just wanted to get some discussion going, and maybe see how others felt about various methods they have implemented or dealt with.

Usually the only place I see it is in the IT Discussions list. They’re almost always gone/deleted before I have a chance to click into one. It makes for an ugly list some days, but they’re usually recognizable.

Since they’re deleted from the actual question threads, about the only thing that would make it better for me is if that deletion could cascade into higher level lists.

Do these also result in output to e-mail inboxes? (They don’t for me so far.)

Tom

I don’t know if this workks for you, but if the Image recognition does not work for you, you could make it where they have to join your site to post.

Hi Tom,

Yes, I have the gotten the daily summary emails with new and updated questions that had 4 or 5 in a row that were just spam “discussions” on a question.

Again, I am not trying to complain about the job Melanie and the other moderators do,

BigKat,

There’s absolutely no need to apologize. We need the feedback from the community regarding these matters in order to improve, so keep it coming! I’m discussing how to get these spam discussions out of the Daily Emails with the IT Knowledge Exchange team right now, and we will keep you updated. But please, keep the suggestions coming!

Best,
Melanie

well, I just wanted to make sure you knew your hard work is appreciated and the difficulty acknowledged

And wouldn’t you know it, the first question I went into today — QMHOLHST sample program — was contaminated. Ah, well.

Tom

Now *that* is ironic!

Seriously, though, I never paid attention to the ‘report question’ button, but I appreciate the explanation!

Can you remove the individual spam comments too, like the one above, or just delete the whole question in its entirety?

@ Koohiisan

LOL, this would have been the one time it would have been neat not to have had the Spam removed

just a few updates on this topic. We installed Akismet over the weekend and it seems to be catching so of the spam. We hope this curbs so of the crap we have seen on the site recently.

In other news we are currently working on some functionality that will allow users to delete questions that appear on the site if they are not relevant.
Question askers will also have the ability to edit their questions to add more details if requested. We are always looking for more ways to give more control to the members to edit the site so if you have any suggestions let us know.

Thanks
Sean

Thanks for the update, Sean.

Great to know about the new functionality you are working on.

I love the idea of allowing some edits! But, there may need to be a way to prevent edits/deletion of an answer once it’s been accepted so that one could not come through and wipe out threads if they wanted to no longer be a part of the community. This happened on another forum I’m in recently, and raised quite an uproar over when to restrict edits.