New Forum Rule: Minimum Posts Before New Thread

Patrick McCarron

TRMK Admin, Co-founder
Staff member
I added a new forum rule to help cut down on spammers. Now in order to create a new thread you must have made 15 posts and be a member for at least a day. This will keep spam bots that the staff has to deal with to a minimum and also reduce the amount of trolls too in some rarer cases.

This shouldn't impact anyone, but be sure to contact me or reply to this thread if you have any problems.
 
Trying many things, and one experiment failed and let a LOT of bots in. I closed that hole but a lot of them have been dormant and started posting again this morning. Still cleaning those up.

Hopefully it'll slow down, many of the bot posts are being caught by spam software as well now so you all didn't see much of the bad stuff thankfully.

Also huge HUGE thanks to those who report these posts/threads as it's super helpful.
 
i'll report them all, i'm ever diligent, always lurking in the shadows, waiting, watching... fapping. i am report man.
 
I can tell you that it won't cut down on trolls. In my experience, trolls will be trolls no matter how many measures you put in place.

As for the spam bots? In the words of the late Cliff Burton: Just effin' Kill 'em All!
 
It's only about as strict as it needs to be. I can't even think of any bots that have made it to 15 posts, regardless of how vigilant we have or haven't been in the past. Most disappear after the day they sign up too.
 
It's been 2 years since I signed up here, and I don't remember if I had to put in a word verification code or anything to that effect prior to signing up (probably not). Do you know if such capabilities can be added to a vBulletin message board?
 
We already have something like that. Pat recently tried a more complex captcha too, but that went really bad. I think a lot of the signups here are actually done by real people while the bots are just used for posting.
 
So we have a new issue now (not really new) - bots are not making threads anymore but they are posting on old ones still.
 
So we have a new issue now (not really new) - bots are not making threads anymore but they are posting on old ones still.

Another thing to consider is have mod/admin approval for the first post. The downside is it may increase the work load.

Yeah that's not happening, way too complex and difficult to have to deal with. We're doing a bunch of things to stop them and we're stopping more than you're seeing actually.
 
Speaking of threads how can I start a new thread? I'm not going to start one now or start making a bunch of them but I was just wondering how to do it incase I think of something and would like to start one? Sorry if this is a dumb question but I am new here lol
 
You don't have enough posts to start a thread yet, but when you do you'll see a "post new thread" button above and below the topic list in each sub-forum.
 
You don't have enough posts to start a thread yet, but when you do you'll see a "post new thread" button above and below the topic list in each sub-forum.

Oh alright cool, thanks for the heads up, I appreciate it.
 
Ah. So that's why I couldn't find the "New Thread" button! Does "Thanking" someone's post also go along with this rule?
 
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