Monitoring New Posts

[haqzore]

I think you took me a little too literally there. After all, no one is actually forced to join our community, and they are not forced to introduce themselves either. It is probably worth mentioning that TAZ also queues first posts for moderator approval. It is not that unusual, else why have the feature available (often as part of the core) with so many forum systems?

I don't disagree with any of your points.

For my communities, I strive to make the process as frictionless as possible at every point (registration, first posts, etc).

 

[Oh!]

I don't disagree with any of your points.

For my communities, I strive to make the process as frictionless as possible at every point (registration, first posts, etc).

And, for most communities, I think that's correct approach too. We only introduced the restrictions because of some specific problems around porn-spam. But we found that people tended to engage more after making their first post. Or, that's the impression we formed.

 

[Nev_Dull]

I don't think there's a wrong way of handling this issue -- except ignoring it. It all depends on the nature of your particular forum and your membership. For most hobby forums, people have come to expect their posts to be immediately published. At the same time, they don't balk at a few restrictions until they've established themselves. For some forums, mandatory introduction posts are accepted. And for a serious, scholarly forum, you could make a case for having all posts pass through moderation before publishing, to ensure content integrity.

As with most things in forums, it comes down to having a defined goal and path, and understanding your audience.

 

[clubeagle]

We changed our registration guidelines a few years ago after several major spam attacks.

We moderate the first 5 posts. We also have Stop Forum Spam integrated into PHP. This catches 99.9 % of spammers.

The reason for the 5 post moderation gives us time to double the IP check addresses and helps us weed out the very few people that have been banned and continue to try to reregister. As we are a brand forum we are also able to redirect issues directly to customer service and not clutter up the forum with complaints by newbies whose only aim is to sign up to vocalize an issue that we can do nothing about. They only wish to go public to put pressure on the brand without making the effort to resolve themselves. They usually post once and we never hear from them again.

The 5 post moderation has eliminated most issues with only the occasional complaint

 

[thenashy]

We find the built in options in XF do very good job. For those that do pass through, we find they tend to be actual humans posting the spam. We found that most of the time they were posting between 1-5 posts by the time we caught them, so now have moderation on new users set at 5.