FUCK!
I got the same private message, and I forwarded it to one of the moderators.
The spammer posted in the Bakers Dozen thread, giving a email address. I reported the post.
Who’s been sending these?
new poster Helline001.
I reported her? post in the Bakers Dozen thread, Game Room.
Man, someone is really unclear on the concept.
As you might imagine their access to this board has been terminated with prejudice.
I got a couple a few days ago from loveone who promised to “get back to you with love” if I write to her “privet” email. (Maybe she lives in a hedge.)
A quick check shows she was banned on the basis of a PM reported by another poster, apparently without ever having posted on the board.
I would encourage people to report any suspicious PMs like this.
FYI, we had this problem a while back and there’s a pretty straightforward solution: make two usergroups for guests. The first one is identical to the current one, but lacks spam-friendly capabilities like PM, email, etc. Posters are automatically promoted from the first group to the second group (the one with full privileges) once they make some token number of posts, e.g. 10.
Most spambots don’t know how to make those 10 posts in a non-obvious way, so you can catch and ban them before they ever PM anyone.
I think I got that one too, but it had already been banned by the time I read it, so I just deleted it and moved on.
Girrafe, I don’t think that would actually work completely. In the Game Room, for instance, we have a couple of new posters who joined the board specifically to play the current Mafia game. This means they had about one or two posts in the thread during the setup period, and then the game started and Storyteller was sending them PMs. Under your proposal, they’d be excluded from that functionality (which is pretty essential for the game), but they’re still legitimate, non-spam posters.
Very few people are going to fall into that trap and if they do, an adminstrator can manually move posters from one group to another. Alternatively, postpad like crazy night zero.
You have to post at least once to sign up for a mafia game, and usually there’s at least a 24 hour waiting period. Spam around here is usually caught within 24 hours, so perhaps we could try upgrading the guest 24 hours from their first post.
At the very least, there’s no real reason for someone who has never posted and just signed up that day to be able to send PMs.
Wait, that’s another idea. They can receive but not send PMs for a certain amount of time after signing up. This usually wouldn’t be a problem in Mafia, right?
I don’t think vB will let you partially restrict someone’s PM abilities, it’s pretty much all or nothing. But you could make the post requirement fairly minimal – most PM spammers don’t post at all, in my experience. So, if you’re worried about newbies needing immediate PM access, make the required number of posts two or three.