Zune Thoughts: Forum Validation and Spammer Protection

I realized I forgot to announce something quite different about these new forums: post moderation. In our old phpBB-based forums, a user could register, and post right away. As great as that was for community growth, it also meant that forum spammers could come to the site, register for an account, and immediately spam our forum. Most of the time it was ten or less spam messages, but Rocco Augusto from Smartphone Thoughts dealt with over 200 spam messages in a single day back in July. Spam frustrates all of us, so with the launch of these new forums I decided to do things a little differently: when a user registers in our vBulletin forums, they are immediately approved. We have no way of knowing which new users are going to spam, so user-level approval isn't effective. When the user makes their first post, however, it is held for moderation. That means the first post anyone makes will be approved by a human. That makes it really easy for us to catch those hit-and-run spammers. After that first post, the user account is automatically upgraded to full status, and no further posts are moderated and will appear instantly. That means that in order for forum spammers to spam here, they'll have to register for an account, make a post that isn't spam, wait for it to be approved, then come back and do their spamming. I can't imagine most have the patience to do that, so I believe these measures will be effective in stopping the vast majority of forum spam.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that in the post moderation queue this morning I saw several people submitting the same post over and over, wondering why it wasn't appearing in the forum. I know that the "your post has gone into moderation" message goes by fairly quickly, so I'm not too surprised at this. But know you know, and as GI Joe always said, knowing is half the battle!