Forums

Stop that user that is spewing out forum topics like a mad man, it is useless.

@giles, do you mind implementing rate limiting as to how many topics a user can create in a specific period of time?

We certainly could look into that -- however, I think that they'll just work around it. We already have a rate limit on the amount of posts someone can make, and they're carefully coming in just below it.

We're blacklisting the IP addresses they're using, and reporting every spam post they make to Akismet, so every post they make harms their chances of posting spam anywhere else on the Internet. Hopefully they'll clue up sometime and realise that they're just hurting themselves and their customers by posting here.

I'm afraid blacklisting IP address may not work as intended. The reason is that most of these spammers use mobile data, hence every time they connect back to the network, they get a different IP address as mobile subscribers implement dynamic IP assignment. I guess lowering the limit rate to the least possible would be a better option because a genuine user may not create more than 2-3 posts per day!

We're more worried about inconveniencing our real users who may have a problem if they're having a conversation looking for help and then find that they've been rate-limited.

We're trying a new way of limiting forum spam now and we'll see how that works.