Restrictions for Buy&Sell

[Ballistics]

I think making the minimum amount of posts in order to post in buy and sell should be between 50 and 100 posts.

Also, what's with this big influx of spammers recently? Seems like the worst it's been since I've been here.

 

[pixmedic]

ive heard about other forums having a post requirement before being able to use buy and sell. but honestly, they would jsut spam somewhere else.
what they SHOULD do is make it a certain number of posts before you can post a link.

 

[Ballistics]

ive heard about other forums having a post requirement before being able to use buy and sell. but honestly, they would jsut spam somewhere else.
what they SHOULD do is make it a certain number of posts before you can post a link.

Maybe corral them in the Buy and Sell, and once they get a certain amount of posts, then they can post elsewhere.

 

[Overread]

Heres the thing:

1) Time limits - any spammer/scammer will just wait out a time limit so all it does is slow the activity on the section down.

2) Post limits - any spammer/scammer will just post outside of the section. "Nice shot" on a few photo threads and they can quickly bump up their post count easily. So the protection only serves to increase the amount of spam.


Having a limit on posting links is the same, all it does is prevent legitimate uses whilst at the same time not actually preventing spammers. Furthermore preventing links might well serve to hide many spammers and as such the auto anti-spam systems might take a lot longer to pick up on potential spam (it does block spam, you guys just never see it ).

Also we have a single tool we can use (as mods) to ban a profile and remove all that profiles posts on the site with a few clicks. But it only works on profiles with under 50 posts. Now we are fast enough that most spam never gets to 50 posts and thus removing it is quite simple. If we imposed a post limit we'd have a lot more work to fully remove spammers from the site itself.

Sadly most blocks or preventions don't actually deal with the problem itself, they just apply a random limitation that inhibits legitimate users and offers no actual protection; whilst some (eg the post limit) simply increases the amount of potential spam bloat.

Sadly spam comes in waves - each time forums gain a new way to block it the scammers/spammers think of new ways to crack it.

 

[terri]

^^ Exactly. Rather than waste effort trying to corral them, we just put up the disclaimer and urge everyone to only deal with people they trust. When threads look really spammy, we trash them as such - so please keep helping us out by reporting suspicious-looking threads - especially in there!!

 

[Majeed Badizadegan]

Heres the thing:

2) Post limits - any spammer/scammer will just post outside of the section. "Nice shot" on a few photo threads and they can quickly bump up their post count easily. So the protection only serves to increase the amount of spam.

Show me the spammer with the work ethic to post 100 times before posting a link to a shady site that nobody will probably click anyway.

 

[480sparky]

......Show me the spammer with the work ethic to post 100 times before posting a link to a shady site that nobody will probably click anyway.

And I'll show you a spammer who can write HTML script that will create those 100 posts automatically.

 

[Michael79]

Theres a mod for vbulletin it works wonders on spam, it does really well from preventing spambots joining the site. Its called bad behavior. Ask the admins to check it out.

 

[Overread]

Heres the thing:

2) Post limits - any spammer/scammer will just post outside of the section. "Nice shot" on a few photo threads and they can quickly bump up their post count easily. So the protection only serves to increase the amount of spam.

Show me the spammer with the work ethic to post 100 times before posting a link to a shady site that nobody will probably click anyway.

Most regular spammers don't really care where their posts end up, just so long as they end up on the site and a couple will sometimes hit the right spot. That said that level of spam is easy to identify anywhere on the site and is removed.

Scammers out to take advantage of buy and sell would easily wait out time limits or post count restrictions to get past them and because they'd likely be more "hands on" chances are they'd be able to hide better than most. Even Ebay and other commercial website have problems with this kind of scamming activity and they've far more resources that they can use to help validate people. As a forum we treat Buy and Sell very much like a "wants" noticeboard. We provide the board and remove any blatant spam, whilst also notifying members that any trades they do are at their own risk. If we wanted to do differently we'd have to dedicated far more resources to the section itself and change it into a more active trading resource (which likely would cost and thus would come with attached fees for users).