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Can we stop the spammers?

Started by rjniles, July 24, 2022, 08:39:53 AM

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rjniles

Is there no way to stop the SPAM about gummies and other bogus health products?

drgeoff

#1
Here is my suggestion to reduce the spam.

The registration form for a new forum account has additional fields to input the OBi number and serial number of an OBi device.  If those match with Obihai's database then the forum account is generated and the user is enabled to post immediately.

If a valid pair of OBi number and serial number is not provided then the account is still generated but is kept inactive for 7 days.  During that time the user is unable to post.

With the above in place, a genuine OBi user without an existing forum account who needs help still register and post just as quickly as now.  People who are interested in buying an OBi but want to ask questions before committing to purchase can do so but would have to wait a week before they can post their questions.  Hopefully many spammers would not come back when the week is up.

Of course this would require non-trivial one-off effort by Obihai/Poly to put it in place and I'm far from convinced that the company would be willing to provide that.

Lavarock7

Perhaps when HP takes over...

Then again, I noticed that they reply to messages here, thus they are not bots. However, I would guess that a number of the messages are posted by IP addresses in blocks belonging to various overseas countries and those could be held for review.

Another issue is they reply to very old messages on a 1st post.

Finally, some old timers here could be allowed to moderate, but that might cause other issues as it has on other forums with excessive moderation. Still, with only a few messages posted a day, an employee could spend 5 minutes managing the spam. However, they may all feel like short-timers.
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