I was recently posting a question in the Newbie-Forum about kernel compiling. I posted the URL of a tutorial that I'd been following. When I posted it said that I had to have atleast five posts to post a URL. Now in my case, this may not be a big deal, and it isn't, but there are some people who come to get help on these forums, and may only make one or two posts, get there question answered, and never need to come back. In there few posts it is helpful for the people answering the questions to see where the asking person is downloading stuff from, what directions they followed, more detailing information on their OS, etc. With this rule in place, it may be harder for users to get their answers quickly. Once again, its not a huge deal, but I thought I should bring this perspective to the site administrator's attention.

Thanks for your time,
shimano55

I think the 5 post rule was bought in to prevent Spam. Too many members were signing up just to promote their website, or some other product, or troll about Windows is better than Linux, etc

--Ian

IBall is correct. LQ has created a very modest post threshold in order to combat spam. The reality is simply that without any limit at all, LQ could become a target for spammers, which obviously would significantly diminish the site's usability and effectiveness. Nobody wants that, so if we agree that establishing some limit is reasonable, then it just comes down to a judgment call as to where to draw the line. Personally, I think the 5 post minimum feels about right, as it is high enough to deter spammers, but no so high as to be a hinderance to legitimate new LQ members. Overall, by instituting the requirement that people have at least a small minimum number of posts prior to being able to post URL's, the intent is block spam rather than to create an obstacle for new members. -- J.W.

And I didn't even know about it.

Mmmm - I 'm sure I read the rules too .....

I agree with the rule, if I could get my own way, I'd increase them from 5 to 10 or more posts, but 5 currently seems to do the trick.

I wish I could do this in my forums. Unfortunately phpBB is not so customizable as vBulletin is in its basic setup.

Five is cool
good call from Jeremy I think on that one

Well, I just wanted to post a "normal" topic and include two links: one to a tutorial which caused my FC3 not to boot up and one to my Xorg.0.log file. However, it was not possible because I don't have the 5 posts. I guess I will have to spam the forums with 4 more posts.

All of the code is open, adding such a feature should not be one bit of a problem for you. Jeremy is running vBulletin code that is almost or probably close to 5 years old, making most of his own customizations himself on code that wasn't even close to having most of the features he has now.

I'm still new to PHP and MySQL and still learning. And yes, I've already applied a lot of third party code modifications

Also the phpBB code uses a lot of internal features, like templating and using a database abstraction layer that takes time getting used to. Hopefully their next version (3.0) will be really powerful.

Back to topic: yes. the no URL rule is fantastic in many ways, but as long as there are spammers they keep finding ingenious ways to circumvent it (by not using the www or the http for instance) or by using the URL in the title of the thread.