Installing a spam killer on my blog last night got me brain-storming about spam on forums. I had (what I thought to be) a neat little idea for handling spam. The concept is simple: let people digg spam. If a configurable number of people vote a comment to be spam it is hidden. This could free up moderators on large forums, and allows users greater control of their board, and makes them act responsibly towards their community. Of course, the idea of abuse will come up, but I think that if the administrator can see who voted which posts to be spam, the problem largely disappears.
What do you all think? Is it a legitimate concept? Would you use it?
mm the problem of abuse is there. Manybe if there was some kind of reputation or post base system it was on. Say if they are on first post they cannot report or even better they can but it takes more people with 1 post than say 3 with 1000posts. Same principle with reputation idea.
immersion the graduated spam reporting is a good idea. Kind of like spam karma. For every 100 posts a user gets 1 vote capping at 10 votes. A message would require a number of votes configurable to the size of the board?
Perhaps users wouldn't even need to know how much karma they had, since power leads to corruption.
I have been trying to do something like this for a long time. First with phpBB, and now with Vanilla. phpBB had mods like this that would remove a post (and even ban a user) if their post/s were "reported" enough times. It also kept a log of all of the times people reported posts, so moderators could watch for fraud.
I really like the idea of a digg extension that allows members to vote down posts. Giving users moderator power is awesome, and seems like the right direction. I don't know about the karma thing though, my experience is that members are best left on a level playing feild. If the karma was done behind the scenes then I don't really see a problem with it.
I would love to see this developed. An extension like this would really round out the Vanilla experience for me. For as young as Vanilla is, it sure gets the best extensions. People at phpBB are so obsessed with sub forums and arcade mods for some reason... Maybe it's a tables thing.
yeah it would be, i prefer to do it with number of posts. As that is nicer. And i think people prepared to mke a greater number of posts are more trustworthy to your forum.
My idea really was that is would be the same having say 2 people with 20posts as 1 user on 40posts. However minimum of 3 reports or something. I cant explain what i mean and no idea how it would work. Just means that there would have to be alot of 1post people in order to report it and less respected 100post members so would advoid abuse. I will have to write a plan to see if it would work. As at the momment the concept is there but i have no idea of the execution.
It's just an idea, but perhaps the Vote extension could be expanded to auto hide comments with a minimum rating (once enough people have voted). It wouldn't the best route to go about it, but it might be a starting point as far as development is concerned.
The other complication with the mod would be how it would treat topics which exist to spam. Inevitably other users reply to spam. The mod would also hide all replies or the topic would become inanely senseless.
Perhaps... it would require an API key for each user though, and I'm not sure the bot danger for Vanilla is anywhere close to that for WordPress. I'd be far more in favor of a unique image on registration to exclude bots.
well, that applies now, but what if vanilla blows up like wordpress did? sure, using a unique image type deal may exclude some bots, but if this blows up i'd be looking for more of something as bulky and credible as akismet. i mean, look at phpbb. i've used it for years and bots will figure there way around something to spam.