Covert Spam

Since 2001, over 90,000 cyclist's have joined Cycling Forums to discuss topics from general cycling to equipment, training, racing and travel or vacation destinations (especially in europe during the tour de france). We also feature an great deals in our online store, 100's of articles, classifieds and product reviews.

There seems to be a lot of threads being started by new usernames where;
1. The users have not posted in any other threads
2. Many topics are not bike related
3. The topics are contraversal

Is there a way of stopping newies from starting threads for a period of time or until a number of posts have being acheived?

Based on my experience as a moderator on other sites, they'll post however you restrict them. At the end of the day, it's a matter of manually deleting them and it's actually easier to identify them when they post new threads rather than some embedded posts. :(

yeah, i've noticed it too, where are our moderaters? i thought the spam was over, but i thought wrong:rolleyes:

Based on my experience as a moderator on other sites, they'll post however you restrict them. At the end of the day, it's a matter of manually deleting them and it's actually easier to identify them when they post new threads rather than some embedded posts. :(Embedded posts are in a way easier to handle since all you have to do is put the poster on your ignore list.

Embedded posts are in a way easier to handle since all you have to do is put the poster on your ignore list.
Tried it but it didn't seem to work. New forum topic search still brought up the person on my ignore list.

Tried it but it didn't seem to work. New forum topic search still brought up the person on my ignore list.Don't know if the search is sophisticated enough to take ignore lists into consideration. But when you browse a thread, the posts should go away. It is still of course, a poor substitution to what should be done ideally - delete the problem threads and ban the user (IP-ban if s/he keeps coming back).