I kind of just wanted to get a straight answer for what the new policy is for newly registered members…
I got a message from forum member “darklight” saying he cannot post anything on the forums. Seeing as he is a new member, I am assuming he cannot post due to him being new? I want to reply back with the official policy…but wanted to clarify it with everyone what exactly is the policy?
Looking at his permissions, it looks like he has access to view forums, but cannot create a new thread or reply to posts.
I didn’t change any of the permissions, so I don’t know if we made any changes?
Since I just cleared a load of spam posts from new members…I assume we don’t have one.
Anyway I have no idea why he can’t post, could it be his IP? Is it in our banned list? That’s the only thing I can think as like I said, there is no universal restrictions for all newbies
Yeah, that can be a downfall of banning by IP. Most spammers don’t have a static address, but a dynamic one, so it changes and they’re able to rejoin to spam another day anyway. Meanwhile, if a legit user happens to be assigned an IP that’s in the range of a banned one…they can’t post : /
I have just implemented that new users will not be able to post new threads until they reach a post count of 5. This could be reached by replying to other threads. Once they have a post count of 5 they will automatically be “promoted” to the Established members usergroup where they will have full posting priviledges
Can you also make it so they can’t have a signature until they join the ‘Established Member’ group as well? The sigs are the big problem when it comes to spammers!
The only feature that new members can use is the ability to post messages to another thread. They have absolutely no priviledges such as signatures, etc
Granted spammers are still able to join but Ill be able to catch them quickly plus they wont be able to post any new threads which is our main problem right now
I only have one concern about this, and by raising this please don’t think I disagree with any of these decisions because I agree that drastic action needs taking against the spammers - but, as I say I have one concern and that’s folks signing up who just want to advertise something for sale in the Marketplace forums, and start up a thread in there…
I’m not saying that these would be a great loss to us necessarily, but nevertheless it is something that makes our forum less attractive to those folks than other forums.
Anyway, not saying that I’d do anything differently, but just raising a thought that occurred to me.
Easy fix Chris…I have edited the forum permissions for new members so that the only place they can start a new thread is in the marketplace section. Any other area and the only permissions they have is to reply to someone else’s thread until they reach 5 posts
Restricting avatars crossed my mind but it is not a problem unless they start posting inapropriate content. The problem is posting and not uploading avatars.
The key here is not to punish new members by restricting areas of their profile such as avatars but rather restrict some areas that could cause problems such as signatures, posting new threads,etc. Currently avatars is not one of them so I will leave it as is unless we start seeing inappropriate content for avatars
