TimWilson
Member
At our member community, forum.ukuleleunderground.com, we have a single forum, our Marketplace for member-to-member sales of instruments, some one-of-a-kind custom creations, costing thousands of dollars, that's recently been attracting scammers. They're not spammers in the usual sense, in that they're clearly actual humans, but they are getting increasingly sophisticated in their claims to own instruments that they do not. Our members are generally diligent about sniffing out the truth about these attempted scams, but it's still creating a lot of chaos that I'd rather not see.
In almost every case, the scammer is making these sales posts as their first thread. We don't want to disallow all new members to start new threads everywhere, especially since we have an "introduce yourself" board that's quite popular. We also do a lot of troubleshooting in our forums, so we'd want new members who joined looking for help to find that help. Most of our new members are good to go. It's only the new members whose first post is in the Marketplace who are increasingly a problem.
My idea is to not allow anyone to start a new thread without either making X number of posts first (so that we can get some idea of who they are, or at least claiming to be), or requiring a token payment (a few dollars). Still working out the details, but I need this restriction to apply only to this single forum, and I'm not seeing the best way to do this.
One idea I'm considering is creating a new secondary group called Marketplace, and automate inclusion for anyone who has more than those X number of posts. I don't know if there's an add-on for this, or if I can automate it through a chron job. Any ideas?
Otherwise, is there a better idea that anyone can suggest for me?
Thanks!
Tim
In almost every case, the scammer is making these sales posts as their first thread. We don't want to disallow all new members to start new threads everywhere, especially since we have an "introduce yourself" board that's quite popular. We also do a lot of troubleshooting in our forums, so we'd want new members who joined looking for help to find that help. Most of our new members are good to go. It's only the new members whose first post is in the Marketplace who are increasingly a problem.
My idea is to not allow anyone to start a new thread without either making X number of posts first (so that we can get some idea of who they are, or at least claiming to be), or requiring a token payment (a few dollars). Still working out the details, but I need this restriction to apply only to this single forum, and I'm not seeing the best way to do this.
One idea I'm considering is creating a new secondary group called Marketplace, and automate inclusion for anyone who has more than those X number of posts. I don't know if there's an add-on for this, or if I can automate it through a chron job. Any ideas?
Otherwise, is there a better idea that anyone can suggest for me?
Thanks!
Tim
Thanks for the reminder on that too!
