Not planned Spam clean permanently delete

[upnet]

First I have to say that XF2.1 is catching a lot more of the spammers than our previous 1.5 implementation was. The improvement is very much appreciated. The option to spam clean from the moderation queue also saves time and works great.

My suggestion is to add a component to the moderation queue that would allow us to permanently delete the spammers content. Perhaps a checkbox next to the spam clean option for “Permanently delete” or a 5th option “Spam clean permanently delete”. Having this would be quite a time saver and cleanup utility. I can see that it’s a little dangerous, but for us we receive 20 or so of these per day so they quickly fill the forums with deleted threads.

 

[Steve F]

While the suggestion is useful there are other mechanisms you can use to attain what you need. I assume you're aware there is already an option to hard delete spam threads in the Spam options.

On a site I help admin on we have a "Deleted Threads Archive" where all deleted spam goes so it does not clog up normal forums then from there it can be pruned after a period of time.

 

[Chris D]

Quite simply if you would like a different behaviour, then you just need to change the defaults. Specifically you would be wanting to look at Setup > Options > Spam management in the Admin CP.

The following options are what you are looking for:



Specifically, you most likely want to set the bottom two options to "Permanently delete" or, ideally, just change the "Spam cleaner thread action" to "Move to forum".

The latter is what we do here. Messages are just soft deleted in-place, but spam threads are moved in their entirety to our "Spam cleaner forum".

As well as being able to prune that on demand by using "Batch update threads" we can also refer back to that forum to monitor trends when it comes to spam content. For example:



There is certainly some patterns there where we can certainly pull some keywords that appear commonly in those threads and add them to our "Spam phrases" list.

(In actuality we've likely had things like "keto" blocked as a spam phrase for a while, and that's most likely why these threads were flagged in the first place )

So, really, I don't see us needing to do anything here. Granular control of the specifics of spam cleaning in the approval queue would really only confound the UI so I suspect it's best to "set it and forget it" and the approval queue will just abide by your defaults.

 

[upnet]

Setting up my spam forum now! Funny we have the same junk. And we have had keto censored for a long time as well. Thanks @Steve F and @Chris D!