Moderators, can't we stop these annoying spammers

[Desdinova]

Assume all here are as fed up as I am with the spammers constantly bombarding this website recently with their often illegal activities. 

Question for the moderators/site owners, but is it not possible to have some form of system where your first post after registering has to be checked by a moderator before appearing on the site. If that would need more moderators, some might be willing to step up and help. 

Thanks

[Zion]

I (we) would happily take that on. The decision and action to set the board up like that, if it is supported on the software running the board (forum) is the domain of @Apollo, he is the site owner and senior admin for those things. The rest of us have roles below his level.

I boot dozens of spanners each day, delete hundreds of spam and illegal posts, file reports with the Fraud squad, the whole 9 yards. What you see is the overspill before we get there. It takes a lot of work. Most of the activities we do, you never see.

[ItsGreen]

If you need a hand with that, just shout. Used to be a mod on Club Polo back in the day and we got hit pretty hard with spammers and scammers.

[Zion]

Fine just now mate. There are a few of us full timers. Thanks for the offer though, will keep you in mind.

[magoo1]

Assume all here are as fed up as I am with the spammers constantly bombarding this website recently with their often illegal activities. 

Question for the moderators/site owners, but is it not possible to have some form of system where your first post after registering has to be checked by a moderator before appearing on the site. If that would need more moderators, some might be willing to step up and help. 

Thanks

A site I use has the forum set up just like that and it’s a few posts before you stop being monitored. Spammers else eliminated.

[Zion]

Assume all here are as fed up as I am with the spammers constantly bombarding this website recently with their often illegal activities. 

Question for the moderators/site owners, but is it not possible to have some form of system where your first post after registering has to be checked by a moderator before appearing on the site. If that would need more moderators, some might be willing to step up and help. 

Thanks

A site I use has the forum set up just like that and it’s a few posts before you stop being monitored. Spammers else eliminated.

I have asked the owner of the forum to set it up this way, so hopefully he will agree and do so.

We spend a lot of time removing spam posts and its probably a lot more than everyone realises.

[Gadgetman]

I don't know if MyBB has it, but for many other forum systems there's a mod that can be installed that adds a 'nofollow' tag to all links posted, which means Google won't count that link when deciding a page's rank in searches.

This really needs to be the default setting for every forum out there because most of the forum spam is all about page ranking, nothing else.

There are automated ways to block spammers from even registering, too...
No, not thinking about Captchas...

Place the signup page source in a separate directory and give it a non-standard name. Then use ROBOTS.TXT to tell Google and other search engines not to index that directory.
Add a index.html page or whatever is the default on the server(default.htm on Winblows servers) that runs a PHP script that blacklists the IP of the requester...

Measure the time from the signup page is loaded and until the 'Create user' script is run. If it's less than a certain time, block, block and effing block.

[Zion]

If Google didn't rank forums highly, then no one would want to own one. It's about Ad revenue. Google rank = adware income.

No one would add nofollow to their forum posts. It's financial suicide. Data storage and hosting aren't free.

All we mods need is the ability to actually moderate all new users posts instead of automatic acceptance in the PHP code.

We can do that manually if a new user registers without posting spam and set them to need approval, but that takes up hours and hours of trawling through new user lists, and then often spammers use software that posts 100 copies in various threads all at once.

[Gadgetman]

The 'nofollow' tag doesn't impact the forum's rank, only the pages that users links to.

[Zion]

Ah ok. Html isnt my strong suit, I'm C# and C++ with previous life lived in VB land.