Sort of SPAM

[Wolfgang]

Today we got posts from this guy on a topic that has nothing to do with any of the discussion boards. I notified the moderator but: all these posts (5) happened within 4 minutes. It has been discussed before why beginners are allowed to post so many posts in such a short time? 

When looking at the user statistics it turns out that the total number of posts is 16, but only 5 can be viewed, so I guess the other 11 have been removed by a moderator before... if this is true, shouldn't one delete the account?

[LiliMcDonald · Accepted solution]

Hi Wolfgang,

Thank you for reporting this to us. The reason you were only able to see 5 of the 16 posts was that the spam system caught the others. We have removed the remaining duplicate posts and are following up with the user via private message.

As for why can a user post so many times in a row, we do have flood controls enabled -- but since they're applied to the whole community, we have to ensure we don't accidentally hinder our regular users, and therefore isn't set too low. There's also some open enhancements we have with Lithium around stopping/notifying users of when they're about to make a duplicate post and the spam system recognizing sooner when a user has posted the same thing multiple times.

Thanks,

[altenbach]

This is not really spam, just a completely clueless user. Obviously, he needs more than just programming help.

Since all posts were identical, lithium could easily prevent these duplicate posts by just e.g. keeping a md5 of each post for a few hours and reject all posts that generate the same digest.