Sim Innovations Forums

This quite a specialized forum.
I wonder what is the real forum traffic.
That is how many new members are registering each month?
Guess that is less than a dozen as an average, hence one new user every two days or so.

Perfectly suited to manual registration, ie approval by an admin IMHO.

Jacques

Ralph wrote: ↑Sun Feb 02, 2020 4:13 pm Oh by the way, 3.3.0 has better captcha, but updating to 3.3.0 would mean that we lose the mention plugin.

I think the mention feature has been good. I wouldn’t want to lose that now we have it.

JackZ wrote: ↑Sun Feb 02, 2020 5:59 pm This quite a specialized forum.
I wonder what is the real forum traffic.
That is how many new members are registering each month?
Guess that is less than a dozen as an average, hence one new user every two days or so.

Perfectly suited to manual registration, ie approval by an admin IMHO.

Jacques

+1

You have all probably noticed that the spamming is getting worse. This past week every time I have visited the forum there has been some spam rubbish. How about limiting new users from starting a new topic until they have posted in other threads at least 5 times and/or limit posting until you have been a member for a few days.

Sling wrote: ↑Sat Feb 27, 2021 8:33 am You have all probably noticed that the spamming is getting worse. This past week every time I have visited the forum there has been some spam rubbish. How about limiting new users from starting a new topic until they have posted in other threads at least 5 times and/or limit posting until you have been a member for a few days.

Unfortunately, It's a difficult one. The "How about limiting new users from starting a new topic until they have posted in other threads at least 5 times" is in my opinion not a good idea or even practical in reality.
Many people actually have a question as their first post and that is presumably, in a lot of cases the reason for actually registering and more or less immediately posting a new topic.
I have personally reported around 10 spam messages in the last few days and I agree it is totally annoying. Yet in a lot of cases - well most - none of the spam posts appear to have been previously flagged. Flagging the posts is after the fact of course, but on EU time, it elicits a rapid response from Ralph etc. It is not difficult to do, I don't even bother filling in the comments or changing the reason, I just click and send. It works and is little effort, but of course, this is certainly NOT the ideal answer.
Ralph has explained - earlier in this thread about the practicalities, certainly at the time he posted, of withholding posts for approval, also the manual cheap labour captcha busters etc.
As for the 'waiting a few days' .. I don't know how that would work as I would imagine the spammer(s) already account for that if needed.
I don't know if the BBS supports rapid successive post blocking ? - I presume it does - that may have some impact. ?
Even asking more specific, targeted questions 'may' be problematic as it is relatively easy to use google to find the answers and the captchas are already broken by human intervention. Yet, it may prove an effective method as the 'captcha busting' human farms are probably not geared up to that.
It becomes more problematic though, that for those questions to be be effective, it 'may' cause some genuine new users issues also. However, it seems a good option to try, and certainly a rapid / successive posting limit / flagging.
As for adding more 'moderators' - well, that opens up a whole boat load of issues and is not, on a forum of this size, a good idea. But, that is another issue ...

I keep seeing these in general

What mechanism is putting “*spam*” in the title? Is it some automated forum mechanism or the bots themselves?

That's the forbidden words 'mechanism'.

Is there anything way to filter posts based on such forbidden words?

There are some plugins yes. But we have the Mention plugin, which prevents us from updating the forums because then it all breaks down. So we don't like to use any plugins at all.