Some of the spam accounts have a greater than 1 post count to them which means they're surviving whatever anti-spam safeguards you have in place. I suggest you remove the 60 second limitation between reporting posts as spam. This is important because of the pattern in play. The spam posts seem to come in waves. Multiple threads will have a spam post in it at the same time. With the 60 second limitation you turn what should be an easy task of reporting 10 spam posts into a ten minute task. This makes it less likely that your users will help you police the forum. And that will allow more spam accounts to stay active.
In the meantime can the 60 second limitation be removed?[/quote] Or, if that's risky in some way, perhaps eliminate the 60sec rule for members with (for instance) 100 posts or more?
Yes, become a paid-up forum member ('Silver Stacker' under your name rather than 'Member') and posting restrictions are removed
I get why you would say that it's great that you support your forum for suggesting I become "paid-up". However, reporting spam is a form of cleaning up the forum which everyone benefits from. That shouldn't be a feature that I should have to pay for. And although I'm not familiar with THIS forums content management system it's safe to say that most of them have similarities to them. One of them being that the limitation on reporting posts is more of a "Radio Button" option in the settings rather than a feature requiring a major rewrite of the coding system.
I "studied" the spam posts and found a pattern. The spam posts link to PDF files hosted on random websites that all share a similar file directory. This suggest that these websites all had the same template for their foundation. A template that has an error in its coding that allows the spammer to connect to and insert their spam PDF into the companies unsuspecting server. To remedy this I suggest trying to find the webmaster contact information of the next website that's used to host these spam PDF files. If that is done then I believe the people who made the "hackable" websites would update their software. This could mean the end of spam for us until another weakness is found.\ ...Just an idea I wanted to throw out there
