:D:D
No that isn’t how to do it. This is the straight dope, the questions should be more like:
- Calculate Pi to the last place
- Create life. Show your work.
Shit. If this gets implemented everyone that’s already a member gets grandfathered in, right?
Or
Will the plane take off from a …?
Perhaps, rather than banning all people from India, you could just make it a bit harder for Indians to join and then immediately post. Make their posts go to a delay or something. Or maybe just put a silent filter on any new Indian user’s post that has a title that starts with “Watch,” meaning they’ll think it posted, but it will be invisible.
How many of these spammers will come back and see if their post ever actually posted? Just as long as it looks like it did, they’ll probably just run off, secure in the false knowledge that some people will see it before it is taken down.
How about:
Any new member who posts a link before their post count reaches say, twenty, gets automatically suspended, pending review/appeal and their posts get automatically moved to the Valley Of The Mods. And make this limitation clear in the registration process.
Pretty sure vB can already do this. Slightly inconvenient for new members who want to link to a SD column (although the straightdope.com domain could be whitelisted), or who want to post an “identify this bug” or other legitimate off-board link, but I think it would be a reasonable tradeoff.
This sort of thing has been proposed before and the mods have come down against it. But maybe just implementing it on known spammer country IPs would work with a minimum of impact on anyone else.
Though I’d be sure that you give the user a warning as soon as they try it and giving them a chance to fix their post–relying on people reading the entire user agreement is faulty for bother legitimate users ans spammers. There are long term posters who wind up surprised at what the user agreement says.
I’m, of course, counting on the fact that spamming a URL modified to get through the filter would not serve the spammer’s goal. Surely they are doing it to game search engines, and not because they think anyone here will click on their links.
And then we can throw shit on them, right?
I’m not showing my work. I’m sure you can find that on the net for free anyway. I do have the cigaret to prove it though, and two cute girls.
Just following on from above, could you ban IP’s from India but exempt certain individual IP’s- such as** Indian**?
I’m pretty sure the Viet Cong weren’t Indian, but I’ll have to double check.
What’s unfortunate - that we have posters form India, or that they’re not spammers?
That would prevent future Indian posters though. And I like the fact that the Dope has an international population, I don’t think I’d want to see a block on a sixth of the worlds population.
Plus, from a user perspective anyways, the current solution seems to be working well. I’ve noticed a few of the “Watch…” ads, but they’ve been disappeared by the mods pretty quickly. It hasn’t really risen to a level of minor annoyance, so I don’t see the need to take extraordinary measures.
Make my a mod and I will vaporize these spammers, while you are still sleeping.
What about an approval system for new posters’ first post?
I’m pretty sure this could be implemented, but it’s much too much of a PITA for the current set of mods. But can the board software allow for Mods of Incredibly Limited Functionality? The functionality/authority of the status would be limited to approving posts—you could practically hand them out like candy. The only real qualification you’d need to set is a pulse and maybe trivial longevity. The one rule (to ring them all) would be simple: only decline if it’s clearly spam. So absolutely no content-related declining would allowed, and any iffy posts get though for later reporting/judgement by a full-fledged mod.
Given enough MILFs, the lag time between new posts and approval would be very small. Look at the time difference between most spam being posted and reported. Plus, the new poster gets the ‘please wait while we make sure you’re not a clever spambot’ shows up after hitting submit. They’ll still see their posts.
When a poster hits submit on their first post, they’d get a “thanks for your post, it should show up shortly—usually within ten minutes.” Rejected posts would get a canned “Hi, Sorry to bother, but our filter system isn’t perfect—if you’re not a spambot, can you write back?” So real mods would get a small handful of appeals, much lower than the number of reports or spam they deal with now.
There is the drawback that if someoen’s first post is to an active thread it will be out of order. But the only threads where that would have a serious impact on the conversation are ‘need answer fast!’ and turn-based game threads. Perhaps the reduction in spam should make up for that?
Anyway, just an idea. Even if you assigned the status to just Runner Pat you’d have ninety percent of new posts taken care of within thirty seconds of their arrival. Whether it’s technologically feasible is another story.
We already have a “spam queue” system that catches suspicious posts and allows us to review them before they become visible to the rest of the board. I don’t think we can apply that just to posters from any one region. It’s made our lives easier but hasn’t caught to many of these “Watch” guys. I assume that’s because they change the content of their posts just enough to avoid the system.
None. They’d be banned by then anyway.
The spam queue does this to a small extent, but the problem with ideas like this is that it would strongly discourage new members from participating. I don’t know how feasible it is technically either. Regardless, we do everything we can to stop spam and I think we do very well at it. But solutions that would frustrate new members don’t seem worth the cost.
I don’t think we can do bans that way - block all IPs in this range except these ones - and increased use of non-static IP addresses makes it tougher to ban spammers who are in proximity to posters. But at this rate, yeah, we may end up banning everything in India except indian and a handful of other people. 
Does anyone know if Indian knows how to operate a drone aircraft? We can make him responsible for his own destiny.
I expect they’ll hook up with cats and help them get that opposable thumb thing worked out … and can openers.
And then we are truly, truly screwed.
OK… how about…
Junior mods.
No, really - invite a posse of longstanding and trustworthy members to have the only the abilitiy to suspend obvious spammers and disappear their posts.
If they abuse this power, you kick their ass (in accordance with a regime similar to the existing warnings/suspension scheme) and restore the falsely-accused member and their posts.
I wish I thought of that 
Or wait, maybe I’m posting from India…
Sorry - I genuinely overlooked your earlier, similar post - great minds think alike.