www.talkcyprus.org

[thebrix]

city wrote: I am with Erolz on this. Even if it requires more work to delete spam posts I prefer that for the reasons given by Erolz.

TheBrix, that kitten thing looks really good. Hopefully it will improve the situation. I will also recommend it to a German forum I'm a member of.

Erolz: I have seen something like an automoderator on another forum. Not sure exactly what it does but as I understand it checks for posts containing certain words or phrases. Do you know about this?

Not me ... it was an article in New Scientist which I saw about a year ago, liked the concept and filed it away in my head for future use. I never expected it to be so directly useful!

The point is that computers, thanks to optical character recognition, can sometimes decode common CAPTCHAs (those boxes with wildly distorted sequences of characters like 2TF8E and QL6E4 which you have to reproduce) but cannot take a grid of nine photographs and work out which ones are of cats ... and will not be able to do so any time soon :D

I also realised there would be plenty of photographs of cats around :P

On automoderation I think the problem is not with (manual) "spam" posts from existing members; it is with being able to sign in (automatically) and then make one "spam" post (automatically). So, if the sign in is stopped, the "spam" posts are also stopped.

[city]

Hi Brix, yes I understood that it wasn't your invention :-)
Bud good on you to remember the tool!

With the automoderator I meant it as an additional measure to fight those that sign up despite the kittenauth.