FlyTrapCare Forums

@Matt Is there any way to obviously mark a thread that's well past it's prime? ( I know the date is there but you've got to consciously look for it. And the original date may be on an earlier page in a longish discussion.) It just seems like I'm seeing more and more 2- and 3-year old (and even older) threads reactivated, usually by new members. It's a bit frustrating to think that you're adding to a discussion and then realize that the original thread is from 2015! I'm not necessarily advocating locking a thread after a certain time has passed but maybe some kind of warning? Even turning the text blue or something would be a big help...

@evenwind, I don't think people are not noticing the date. From what I've noticed, we're seeing a huge increase in the number of spammers coming to the site and they are the ones who typically post to old threads. Yes, some legitimate members then post as well, but in almost every case I've seen the person (or bot) posting to very old threads is a spammer.

The part that's super annoying as a forum administrator is that they will then come back a few days to weeks later and edit their posts to drop spammy links. What a pain! That's why I had to disable the editing of posts until I could think of and implement a way to prevent them from doing that.

Thus, I don't think much of anything I could do would prevent these old threads from being posted again by these spammers. There are all sort of spam countermeasures in place all over the web but spamming is still a huge problem and is growing. As more and more people come online, particularly in impoverished areas of the world, people are being paid to sit online and pass all of the spam-prevention countermeasures to create accounts that can be used to spam links. It is super annoying and there's no way to defeat an actual person with endless time on their hands who wants to create spammy content. We just have to address it after the fact and deal with it the best we can.

Thanks for making it clear.

Matt wrote: ↑Fri Apr 02, 2021 4:33 pmFrom what I've noticed, we're seeing a huge increase in the number of spammers coming to the site and they are the ones who typically post to old threads.

How about some requirements like "you must make 20+ posts before you can edit an existing post" or "you must be a member for at least 30 days before you can edit an existing post". These won't stop the determined spammers but they might make this forum more trouble than it's worth for them.

MikeB wrote:How about some requirements like "you must make 20+ posts before you can edit an existing post" or "you must be a member for at least 30 days before you can edit an existing post". These won't stop the determined spammers but they might make this forum more trouble than it's worth for them.

Earlier this week I modified the code to do something very similar to your suggestions, which is why editing is enabled again for most forum users