Protective Measures to Minimise Human Spammers

[Mouth]

Interested in what automated protective measures others are doing to minimise human spammers, apart from the obvious reactive actions from admin/moderators to delete posts etc.?

I have a 'Validated Users' group with a usergroup promotion from Registered Users based on Trophy Points. The Validated Users group then has greater permissions (eg. edit sig, post profile posts, upload attachments, and content creation via add-ons (eg. wiki, events, directory, etc.)). Essentially, my Registered Users can only post messages/topics in the forums until they achieve the trophy points for automated promotion to the Validated Users giving them much greater content creation permissions.

It appears to work well to keep out many of the human spammers using sigs and profiles, without being overly onerous on proper users. What measures do you use?

 

[craigiri]

Stop country spam, reg form timer, Xentutilities and QA - after that, ALL first posts are moderated.

Between that and me occasionally scanning the newer usernames (fuzzy logic can show who is most likely a spammer), we have almost no spam. If a spammer wanted to spend all that time and energy and get through, my mods and user community would report them and move the post to our hidden "limbo" right quick...

Knock wood...spam has not been a problem for many years. I think, for those of us who can lock out entire countries easily, there is an advantage.