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Fallschirmjager -> RE: General Discussion Destroyed by Spam (7/8/2012 7:53:08 AM)
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I have not visited in a while (not for reasons of spam) but the most annoying thing about this is not the spam but the fact that a couple of simple steps could greatly reduce it if the Matrix team would just spend half an hour on forum maintenance.
There are two simple steps that could be enacted to reduce or stop spam.
1. When you register a new account one of the final steps would be a series of pictures with a radio button underneath them. You could have them be military related. 1 would be a plane, 1 would be an aircraft carrier, 1 would be a rifle, 1 would be an artillery piece and 1 would be a tank. There would be a question that asked you to correctly choose the picture of a tank. You then click the radio button.
2. Every new user has to get their first 10 posts approved by a moderator before they appear on the forum. I know this adds work but they could reach out and ask for volunteer moderators to approve these new posts. And no I am not volunteering.
I help moderate a forum for another game company about the size of Matrix and we used to have a problem with spam up until last September.
We upgraded our forum software and enacted by two steps. We went from 70 new users a day (67 of them being bots) and 50-100 spam threads a day down to during the entire calender year of 2012 I can count our spam threads and the number of bots we have banned on one hand
I hate to sound like I am being critical of Matrix but they seem to embody the wargame industry as a whole that they are always 3 years behind the times.
Matrix does not have a marketing budget. These forums are their biggest advertisement for their games.
It is bad for business to let them go to ****.
One last thing, I find it funny that the people on this forum get mad at the spammers thinking there is a real person sitting in a chair advertising by spam.
90% of the spammers are not even people. They are sophisticated software bots created by people in Eastern Europe, Russia, China and Southeast Asia for the purposes of advertising. Every time someone clicks on the link it is tracked and the software created gets a few cents.
They are pretty skilled software engineers who probably live on less per day than we spend on our morning coffee.
But anyways, I have said what I intended and I hope Erik and the rest of the team enacts some solutions to clean up the forum.
And one last thing I forgot. These software bots are getting more and more sophisticated. The usual method of having a .jpg image of characters that you type in is no longer working. These newer bots are able to 'read' the image, pick out the characters and still register an account.
That small step is no longer working and forums are having to go to asking people to answer what is 2+3 or my #1 solution.
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