Be aware of the following features of this application. When you first join your abilities to post links, attachments, or change your profile is limited. As you may know, I see dozens and dozens of attempts to log in each day. And some of them are successful, and some of them even manage to make a spammy post with a link to God knows where. I have tried many different ways to prevent that but the software just doesn't have the capability. Now, with WPForo, we have the capability built-in!
Here is an excerpt from the WPForo documentation.
wpForo Spam Control
This is a core spam detecting function which works based on the level of spam suspicion. We recommend keep this option enabled and set the suspicion level from 20 to 60. This system checks all posts of spammers, then compare them, and then it tries to understand whether they are spam or not. If you enable “Ban user when spam is suspected” option, then you should periodically check the users’ status and make sure the banned user is a spammer, because there is no way to automatically detect spammers with 100% correct result.
User is New (under hard spam control) during first [X] posts
This is the main entry point of spam protection functions. The spam scanner mostly works on users who have “new” status. The “new” status is based on number of approved posts, and it can be set here. By default, it’s set 3 so the user who has 3 or fewer posts will be under hard spam scanning process and most of the posts will be unapproved and will await administrator approval.
Posts must be manually approved
If this option is enabled the spam protection system will not check and try to find spam content, it’ll always set all posts of “new” users as unapproved. The “new” user is the user who doesn’t have the minimal number of approved posts. The minimal number is set in the previous option “User is New (under hard spam control) during first [X] posts”.
Min number of posts to be able to edit profile information
In most cases spammers register and do their spam in the profile page, they create spam profile pages with lots of links and spam content. They use “About”, “Website” and “Signature” profile fields. This option will stop users editing their profile information unless they have more than the minimum number of approved posts. Thus, you can prevent creating of spam profile pages.
Min number of posts to be able to attach a file or post links
These are good additions to the spam protection functions. You can set minimum number of approved posts users must have to see the file attachment button or leave a link in post content. All links will be deleted permanently and users will see [deleted link] in the post if this option value is set more than 0. This behavior will be stopped automatically once the user got the minimum number of approved posts.
Jerry
I fly (and ride) to free my mind from the tyranny of petty things. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
One sees this level of security in other motorcycle related forums so it will not be something completely new. My typing is not the best, probably the worst, I like how the auto-correct works here.
We have a leg up on spam here. As users of the sight we tend to spot spam quick. The special nature of sidecars is something spammers in general don't understand. And know a deal to good to be true is.
Yes better spam control is a good thing. The faster they are detected and blocked the better.
@thane-lewis - Probably not, not sure. The WPForo may have a custom email for new users but I am going to use our separate membership management plugin/application so it will not know about this feature of the forums. Probably not a big deal. My recommendation is to educate the several moderators to watch for new posts and approve them quickly (same day?). It is something we will have to watch and learn.
But regardless, I can't tell you what a relief it will be to not have to watch for spammy posts! Our current forum application can't stop them and I have not been able to figure out a way in Wordpress (the website framework). These spammy posts that contain links are highly dangerous and we have users who may not be aware of that. We have to protect them and this will do that.
Jerry
I fly (and ride) to free my mind from the tyranny of petty things. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
1). With this new program, will there be a day when we can have "USCA member only" access to certain sections? Maybe using their membership number as a key?
2). Currently we print and mail out a costly Emergency & Friendship (E&F) Directory to all USCA members. If this was online and accessible only to our members, they could find that information using a smart phone or iPad while on the road. The feature of "USCA Members near me" quick finder is a smart idea. But then all of the membership data would have to be available to this pWPForo.
3). Also a Vendor Forum for our magazine advertisers would be beneficial.
What is the small "p" in the lower left corner here indicate? It only appears when I start to type a new reply.
When I hit Add Reply, it disappears...
@jan-2 The small 'p' in an HTML text type indicator. I answered this question in another post. Let's see how this works. Check out my post here https://sidecar.com/wpforo/postid/41/ and I think it is the 5th post down. As Drone mentioned, unfortunately the individual posts are not numbered.
Jerry
I fly (and ride) to free my mind from the tyranny of petty things. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
