Thanks Brendan.These are anti-spam measures
Spammers flood askaboutmoney, so there is an anti-flood measure which makes new users wait 10 minutes to post a second time. So we usually get to ban them before their second post.
And by replacing the word spamspamspamspam and other words like spamspam and spamspamspam with the word spam we make their links meaningless.
Brendan
These are anti-spam measures...
...And by replacing the word spamspamspamspam and other words like spamspam and spamspamspam with the word spam we make their links meaningless.
The text replacement is very crude and is not anti-spam. We can still see the spam and it's still annoying. Preventing them from posting in the first place would be an anti-spam measure.
Well word replacement triggers for words like "fit-ness" and that was used at least 4 times in my other thread.No anti-spam measure is 100% effective, spammers have tools that can defeat CAPTCHAs and pretty much any measure you can put in place. What would the user experience cost of more stringent measures be here? The majority of spam posts are caught by a filter and never make it to the public forum. The volumes that make it through are very low, and the links are broken in the vast majority of cases. The word replacement measure is crude, but it's rarely triggered (looks like 11 times so far in 2020).
If AAM had the financial resources of the spammers, we might do more, but as it stands Brendan maintains AAM from personal funds and the occasional donation. AAM is not revenue generating.
I personally do not enjoy using captchas and recaptchas. There was a lovely Snoopy cartoon on this recently... Recaptcha is showing Snoopy a picture of his doghouse and requesting he state if it is a house, a bed or a plane. Good question...2. Integrate a spam filtering tool like a Google captcha or your own branded math spam captcha perhaps. How about a roll your own solution that poses challenges like "what's the capital of ireland?"
Just my 2 cents.
Thanks huskerdu.I am an average user of AAM who has spent the last 30 years working in technology .
I respectfully disagree with your opinion .
You fail to take into consideration that your posts got caught by the word replacement as it was not really relevant to the core vision of the site.
The 10 minute timeout only affects new users and most new users have coped fine without suggesting that the site be recreated .
Captchas would be irritating to the majority of users .
What about a geography challenge for registration then?
Maybe they were from Cork people who just kept entering Cork?We certainly had one asking people to name Ireland's second largest city.
While most people answered it correctly, I get occasional emails from Irish people frustrated by being unable to answer it.
I am an average user of AAM who has spent the last 30 years working in technology....