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Interesting concept. I think the whole user level system in general needs to be totally revamped.
Like it only takes a single post to be elevated from "New User" to "Member". Why? Who would create an account and never make a single post? What demographic of the site is served by the "New User" group? Or why does 100 or so posts get you into "Senior Member", but it takes 5000 to get to the next level?
Personally, I think you should be a "New User" for at least 10 to 20 posts, as you said, to limit spammers. From there, you would be a "Regular Member" until something like 200 posts, which would put you up to "Senior Member". There should be a few more user groups sprinkled in before hitting "Guru" too.
Interesting concept. I think the whole user level system in general needs to be totally revamped.
Like it only takes a single post to be elevated from "New User" to "Member". Why? Who would create an account and never make a single post? What demographic of the site is served by the "New User" group? Or why does 100 or so posts get you into "Senior Member", but it takes 5000 to get to the next level?
Personally, I think you should be a "New User" for at least 10 to 20 posts, as you said, to limit spammers. From there, you would be a "Regular Member" until something like 200 posts, which would put you up to "Senior Member". There should be a few more user groups sprinkled in before hitting "Guru" too.
Distribution: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu
Posts: 13,602
Rep:
Quote:
Originally Posted by MS3FGX
Like it only takes a single post to be elevated from "New User" to "Member". Why? Who would create an account and never make a single post?
There are 10's of THOUSANDS of members who do this, for a variety of reasons. The main one is the ability to track read posts, but there are many many others.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MS3FGX
What demographic of the site is served by the "New User" group? Or why does 100 or so posts get you into "Senior Member", but it takes 5000 to get to the next level?
None of the above numbers reflect how user groups work here at LQ.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MS3FGX
Personally, I think you should be a "New User" for at least 10 to 20 posts, as you said, to limit spammers. From there, you would be a "Regular Member" until something like 200 posts, which would put you up to "Senior Member". There should be a few more user groups sprinkled in before hitting "Guru" too.
I think you may be confusing user titles with user groups.
Distribution: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu
Posts: 13,602
Rep:
Quote:
Originally Posted by dugan
I've seen this exploited. A new member would make a post that consists of randomly mashed keyboard keys, then immediately post spam.
A spammer would be able to make any number of arbitrary posts though, so raising the number of posts before URL would not have any impact. Before a member goes from 'New Member' to 'Member', they must make a post. All posts made by members in the 'New Member' group go through a variety of spam and other heuristic checks. It's not perfect and some spam gets through, but a huge amount gets caught and the mods typically clean up what gets through very quickly. Improving (and possibly expanding) the current checks will be considerably more sustainable, effective and new member friendly than arbitrarily raising the number of posts needed to post a URL.
This may explain why my first post was not received...
Dear Jeremy:
I posted my first post which I believed was a well drafted and thoughtful question but which also included the technical URL's for clarity.
It has been about 12 hours since I fist posted the message and yet the message still is not showing up. Could it be the URL's prevented the post from being received or is this just a new user delay in activation of my account? And if so, how long should we expect a new user account activation to take?
Here's another one that seems to have slipped through. One post, and a signature full of advertising links. The post itself is compliment spam: "great post" followed by the payload: the sig, where the ads are.
Distribution: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu
Posts: 13,602
Rep:
A member can add a sig after they make their first post. Keep in mind that .sig spamming is not very effective anyway, as guests (and therefore search engines) do not see .sigs and members can turn them off.
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