Time limits on forum actions

[vasa1]

There are restrictions on using search (15 sec) and report functions (30 sec). In other words, one has to wait 15 or 30 sec before using those functions again.
But there are no restrictions on posts. A "person" seems to be able to make as many posts as possible without any interval needing to elapse. Or, if I'm wrong, can't the interval be increased?

[kdane4]

There's a 20 second time limit on posts, in the cafe games anyway.. So I'm guessing its implemented on the whole forum. Why the need for an increase in the limit? just curious.. Honestly, I like it the way it is..

[vasa1]

There's a 20 second time limit on posts, in the cafe games anyway.. So I'm guessing its implemented on the whole forum. Why the need for an increase in the limit? just curious.. Honestly, I like it the way it is..

I don't visit the cafe games section but I have the impression that spammers try to make as many posts as possible in the shortest possible time before they're caught.
Anyway, I guess it's a matter of priorities.

[Elfy]

There is a time limit on posting as well.

[KiwiNZ]

The delays serve their purpose well, I see no pressing reason to change.

[coffeecat]

@vasa1, my apologies for not getting back to you when you raised this in a pm discussion we had about another matter. You can blame absent-mindedness on my part!

The 20 second time limit on repeat posting was implemented long before my time as a staff member. My guess (and only a guess) was that it was introduced to prevent duplicate posting at a time when hardware problems were slowing the forum down to a crawl and people were re-posting because they thought their posts had disappeared. It's still useful and does help to prevent flooding by over-enthusiastic posters - 20 seconds seems about right.

Your point about slowing spammers down is a good one, but if we extended the time to make an appreciable difference to spammers who flood post, we would seriously inconvenience innocent members of the forum. Spam flooding probably mostly comes from spambots, which are infinitely patient anyway and would simply go on repeat posting whatever time limit we imposed.

A few weeks ago we implemented a measure which had a dramatic effect on spammer registrations, and possibly kept (most of) the bots out, just leaving the human spammers doing their thing. I didn't post a public announcement of this describing what we had done because walls have ears and the enemy could be listening! Any details could be useful to the spam herders. So at the moment, spam is still a problem but the rapid-fire spam posters are less evident - at least that's my impression - emphasis on "at the moment". It's war of attrition between us, the good guys, and the spammer bad guys.

[vasa1]

...
I didn't post a public announcement of this describing what we had done because walls have ears and the enemy could be listening! Any details could be useful to the spam herders. ...

Absolutely!
And thanks for the considerate explanation

[vasa1]

The delays serve their purpose well, I see no pressing reason to change.

See how many posts "jerseys9o72c" has squeezed in.

[critin]

See how many posts "jerseys9o72c" has squeezed in.

It's been my understanding that if a spam report is done on one post, staff do a quick check on all of that spammers posts and deletes them all . So reporting one is effectively reporting all. That keeps reports to staff down too.

I could have misunderstood, if so, I will check the spammers posts for more.


OT: "spammer" needs to be added to the dictionary. It's been around a long time, but is still being red-lined. or I am spelling it wrong.

[lisati]

It's fairly quick and easier for the forum staff (mods and admin) to find all the posts a spammer has made, and subsequently move them all out of sight. Reporting the first spam by a user that you find is usually sufficient.