To prevent spam bots on forum

[jorb]

Skeptical. Have considered things like forcing user to have an ingame character before being allowed to post, or the like.

[graouh]

It's clearly not a priority.
Of course the random spam is annoying, but admins quickly remove them, that keep them occupied because this community clearly doesn't need moderation

Anyway, I don't like captchas too much, because it ruins accessibility, plus it's often a way for google to get more info on people with its "recaptcha".
And about forum admins intervention to accept accounts, I'm not quite convinced, when you create an account to post on the forums you want to do it directly, and not wait for an admin to be up to eventually validate your account.

I'd go for email validation personnally. It's required to play the game anyway, why wouldn't it be required to post on forums ?
And then blacklist those means spam domains when they pop up.

[DDDsDD999]

I'd go for email validation personnally. It's required to play the game anyway, why wouldn't it be required to post on forums ?
And then blacklist those means spam domains when they pop up.

It already is required.

There should be an in-game character requirement, though that should include dead ones and maybe previous worlds. 1/4th of the 1st page of C&I was spam bot topics for about 7 hours today, it seems like a pretty minor addition that the vast majority of spam bots wouldn't bother circumventing.

[shubla]

I
Anyway, I don't like captchas too much, because it ruins accessibility

1 captcha when registering is not going to ruin anyone's accessibility.

plus it's often a way for google to get more info on people with its "recaptcha".

Doesn't have to be recaptcha, nearly anything is enough to get rid of the most simplest bots. And I doubt that it would take a long time to implement this.

And about forum admins intervention to accept accounts, I'm not quite convinced, when you create an account to post on the forums you want to do it directly, and not wait for an admin to be up to eventually validate your account.

I agree

Have considered things like forcing user to have an ingame character before being allowed to post, or the like.

Probably a good idea, but there are some people who might struggle to get the game installed and ask help on forums, maybe users like this could get limited posting access to forums (only HDI and Bugs section), with some ridiculous thread creation and posting rate limits, possibly limits on length of the post. Completely eliminating spammers would be the optimal, but even decreasing the amount would ease the situation a bit, reading forums gets difficult when there are 50 new spam threads with arabic and html inside of them.

[MagicManICT]

Good thing that we have hard working moderators so we don't need any captchas!
I'm fairly confident that the current bots could be stopped by adding even the simplest methods of user verification to registration form.

no captchas or user verification but we could do with some more active mods.

I wouldn't be against this. Not sure why jorb doesn't try to recruit a couple more people... guess the community drives off the moderators faster than they can be found?

jorb's idea isn't too bad, but I just think of games like Path of Exile who still have issues with spammers in the game. Companies like Blizzard have thrown enough money at the problem to more or less resolve the issue (plus it's probably not worth the expense of buying new copies of WoW to spam for a few days before the account gets permabanned, if you can even get your spam message through in the first place). In comparison, we're talking a large corporation with a few million subscribers just for one game world wide vs a small company with a few dozen employees (PoE) vs what is basically a "personal project"--two guys at home.

[shubla]

Good thing that we have hard working moderators so we don't need any captchas!
I'm fairly confident that the current bots could be stopped by adding even the simplest methods of user verification to registration form.

no captchas or user verification but we could do with some more active mods.

I wouldn't be against this. Not sure why jorb doesn't try to recruit a couple more people... guess the community drives off the moderators faster than they can be found?

jorb's idea isn't too bad, but I just think of games like Path of Exile who still have issues with spammers in the game. Companies like Blizzard have thrown enough money at the problem to more or less resolve the issue (plus it's probably not worth the expense of buying new copies of WoW to spam for a few days before the account gets permabanned, if you can even get your spam message through in the first place). In comparison, we're talking a large corporation with a few million subscribers just for one game world wide vs a small company with a few dozen employees (PoE) vs what is basically a "personal project"--two guys at home.

But there isa bit more motivation to spam stuff at wow players than at HnH players also, so the size difference doesn't really matter, I am sure that most of the spam issues that the forum has can be solved with less than 1 day of work and minimal impact to real people.

[MagicManICT]

But there isa bit more motivation to spam stuff at wow players than at HnH players also, so the size difference doesn't really matter, I am sure that most of the spam issues that the forum has can be solved with less than 1 day of work and minimal impact to real people.

Ad spam is ad spam. We deal with ads for "other products," they mostly deal with RMT. I'll say that I've seen the ocassional ad slip through the Blizzard forums, but it's rare, and it's gone quickly. I'm not sure about the PoE forums because I just don't hang out there much. (too much of the useless +1 type posts, and the user headers are so large due to the way support tags are done, you see maybe two posts at 1080 without needing to scroll.) Both companies can afford paid staff to deal with the customer service and quickly address spam reports.

[wonder-ass]

no captchas or user verification but we could do with some more active mods.

I wouldn't be against this. Not sure why jorb doesn't try to recruit a couple more people... guess the community drives off the moderators faster than they can be found?

youre the only active mod beside granger that resigned since nobody liked the way he moderated.
#Bleh for moderator. With the people For the people.

[Vigilance]

I wouldn't be against this. Not sure why jorb doesn't try to recruit a couple more people... guess the community drives off the moderators faster than they can be found?

not to get too far in to this outside of plea but it really doesn't help that the only mods jorb has had for some while now are the internet embodiment of hall monitors and the moderation style strongly clashes against the majority of active posters, and often moderation decisions are *not* taken when they should be, and we've got some crazy post count bloaters kicking around shamelessly and undaunted.