Cobaltchat.com

Although we have pretty good safeguards in place against automatic registration and spamming the board, we do still get spam posters every month or two (which is pretty infrequent, even for a board as young as ours). If you see a post that should be deleted, please:

Click the exclamation mark in the top right corner of the offending post. It should say the words "Report this post" if you hover over the button before pushing it. This will ensure that it is brought to our attention, and doesn't go unnoticed.

Thanks!

John

Thanks for the update John.

John they hit almost every post. On some of them there wasn't a ! Point so I couldn't tag them. Last thread in every post.

What's up with people like this. Mayne a new team member can only post so many times? This is crazy.

Go it cleaned up, and banned the suspects. I haven't seen a spammer attack every post before, but I'll look into a limit for newer users. You go on vacation for one weekend...

Edit - saw we had one more on Tuesday morning. I can clean them up by hand, but I'm also looking into better tools to keep this from happening.

In short, the problem is that we either have to annoy potential new users by not allowing them to post right away, or leave the door open to the mass flooding we saw last weekend. Our signup captcha and email confirmation prevent most of the automated bots from registering and posting stuff, but we can't really stop a dedicated person from doing so as easily.

It isn't easy to limit the number of posts a person can make in a day, for example, but we can tinker with a minimum time requirement between posts. At some point, there simply won't be value for a user to stick around for a long time to make a bunch of posts that will likely be deleted within hours anyway.

If we continue to grow over the next couple years, it also makes sense to look at designating more moderators as well, so these things can be knocked down a little faster.

John

Can you moderate first posts? Don't let them post till an approved user? Kind of like the classified sections in most forums.

I just want to say thank you to everyone responsible for this site, and for everything that has been done to create it and to keep it running.

I now own my first Cobalt, and I look to this site as a valuable resource. I'm not new to boating, but I am new to this site and have read almost every thread that is here.

When things happen like what happened last weekend I get a little protective and wish I could reach through the interwebs and get ahold of whoever caused that commotion. Obviously I can't, so I will say it again, THANK YOU!

BigBlock, it looks like that may be easier to implement when the new version of Phpbb comes out (months?), but there's still some question regarding whether that would discourage new posters. My ideal would be to limit people with fewer than 10 posts to 3 posts per day or some such thing, but I haven't found a way to do that yet.

The real issue this last weekend is that I was "up north" for five days, and didn't have reliable Internet on a weekend that was coincidentally the worst for spam that we've ever seen.

Right I thank you for your hard work on this site also. If I knew more about helping you out I would be more than willing. The bad I'm not a big I.t. Guy.plus I do everything from my phone.

Part of our difficulty is that our site now shows up on site rankings, so people think it's worthwhile to spend time here manually spamming the board (we always had pretty good protection against spam bots). Reaching a critical mass is apparently a mixed blessing...

I think I agree with you before limit first time posts. What a pain.

Missed this too. Sheesh. We don't say thank you enough John, every other Cobalt site sucked before you created this one.

I am pretty tech savvy and if you need a general I'm here for you. Happy to mod. I'm sure the same of BB (we just have to send him a laptop, although he is probably more proficient on that phone than I am at the pentagon).

What's a laptop?lol

If we get too busy I think that will be a good idea. For now, I just have to check daily and spend a few minutes cleaning up when a Russian spammer jumps on.