Conquer Club

Sadly, we have recently been attracting some losers who think it's worthwhile spamming us with adverts for other sites.
How can we stop them?

One could perhaps deter the spammers by auto-removing any external links, but that would reduce the general usability of the site: some of the forums rely on genuine external links for the discussion - Acceptable Content for example.
Is that a price worth paying? Or is it sufficient just to report any spam that turns up and have a mod do a manual edit (thanks TeeGee)? Is it possible to distinguish (and keep) internal links (games, quotes, users etc)?
I would hope that the minimum punishment for spam was instant removal from the site, although that doesn't seem to have happened in every case yet.
For some reason the number has increased recently.

Other than banning external links, the only thing I've thought of is preventing posting anywhere on the site until having completed a minimum number of games or a certain amount of time (spam posters invariably post immediately after joining).

Any workable ideas?

I've been taking (or trying to take) a bit of downtime, will be back in a week or 2

some filters have been added to certain parts of the forum for testing to see if we can keep the spam out without it affecting regular users.
If these tests work then the filters will be applied across all sections.

Why are we not blanketing the test across all sections? Because we want to make sure there are no negative effects.

In the short term, please keep flagging them and I will try and keep up with the deletions

Not happening yet...

Apatheist wrote: Wed Jul 22, 2026 9:59 am Not happening yet...

It's a slow and painful process, I agree.... and means I get to spend 1-2 hours a day sifting through looking for the spam, deleting it and dealing with the same spammers over and over.
Just have to trust the admins have some idea and are learning with each post and yes I am harassing them to fix this way more often than you are asking me
Most of the early phpBB modifications (mods, not to be confused with moderators, also mods) do not work on this new version and since forums are a dying method of communication, new mods are much slower in being released. I'm not sure if it's also partly due to the new security protocols in this version making it harder to get mods to work

Thanks to those who report the spam as it shows, makes it much easier for me

TeeGee wrote: Fri Jul 24, 2026 7:44 pm

Apatheist wrote: Wed Jul 22, 2026 9:59 am Not happening yet...

It's a slow and painful process, I agree.... and means I get to spend 1-2 hours a day sifting through looking for the spam, deleting it and dealing with the same spammers over and over.
Just have to trust the admins have some idea and are learning with each post and yes I am harassing them to fix this way more often than you are asking me
Most of the early phpBB modifications (mods, not to be confused with moderators, also mods) do not work on this new version and since forums are a dying method of communication, new mods are much slower in being released. I'm not sure if it's also partly due to the new security protocols in this version making it harder to get mods to work

Thanks to those who report the spam as it shows, makes it much easier for me

Would preventing people from posting for the first 24/48 hours not be easier to implement?

Giving this a bump. It's almost daily now. Just stop people posting for the first 24 hours after they join.

A similar idea would be for players to play at least one game (a full game, not going AFK and losing) before they can post in the forums.. seems to be little downside to that to would-be players/posters and the (I assume) bot farms used to set up spam accounts here would probably find it too much work to deal with in their mass-spamming efforts.

zen330 wrote: Wed Sep 02, 2026 9:19 pm A similar idea would be for players to play at least one game (a full game, not going AFK and losing) before they can post in the forums.. seems to be little downside to that to would-be players/posters and the (I assume) bot farms used to set up spam accounts here would probably find it too much work to deal with in their mass-spamming efforts.

You will note that I suggested a minimum number of games as an option in my original post.