I suggested this in another thread, and I'm afraid it may have been buried in with the other discussions.

Any chance of changing the requirements to start a new thread topic to users with a minimum number of posts?

I just noticed another newbie spammer trying to sell his wares on FT.

This change could go a long way to making the lives of our ever-hard working mods just a bit easier.

Another suggestion was to restrict the ability to post urls to a minimum number of posts, which I would also support, but I don't think it would be as effective as restricting the starting of new threads.

Think of all the spammers that would go away

I like your suggestion Mary2e. Who does he think will buy from him since his post is worded poorly?

It's not just him, there's several that I've found in the past. Some are particularly persistent.

I know that the mods do their best, but this would keep them from having to do very much at all to deal with spammers.

What standard do you propose?

What about new posters who show up with an actual, honest-to-god, new question about points, miles, travel, etc.?

The last I saw was 10 posts before being able to start a new thread.

New users who want to start a thread could get an "error" message that says there's a minimum to start a thread and that they could contact a moderator to start the thread for them.

I would imagine this would be far less work than having to suspend spammers & then look for mods of other forums to delete their handiwork.

I do believe in the other thread there were one or two replies to your suggestion and one of them to me represents a big issue that would need to be addressed. If we restrict new members from starting threads then if they have a question they will be forced to either not ask it or to potentially hijack an existing thread to ask it (or search for the answer.) I realize that quite often new member questions tend to be ones that have been asked and answered before, and that this might force new members to actually "search" for an answer before they could ask it. This though could potentially cause a different problem and that is new users must become proficent "searchers" of FT information before they can really get useful information that helps them. Or, based on my previous assertion, they would clutter existing threads with potentially OT to that thread content. I'm not sure that we will have helped matters if either situation happens.

I'm sure there are a number of folks who might think that forcing someone to at least get somewhat familar with the search feature is a good thing, and that is probably a fair point up to a point. But what is that point and does this cross it or not?

Your second proposal of limiting URLs might be a good compromise as there are probably fewer reasons for a new poster to ask a question that requires a URL. But now we potentially limit a new users ability to help answer questions. Quite often I answer with a link to a specific thread/post or even a diffferent website. So the question becomes is the benefit of this limit worth the potential cost?

I don't think we can answer the benefit question unless we know just how much time the mods spend cleaning up after the spammers. There are also the jokers who come simply to post a gripe about a service provider and then disappear. As a matter of fact, the folks at fodors.com often SEND people to FT to complain about something So, they keep all the good information to themselves & send the garbage to FT

I don't think it's such a terrible thing for a newbie to learn the FT ropes, particularly searching.

If they have a question they can't find an answer to, or have some information they would like to share that hasn't already been shared, a moderator could post the question or comment. I think that's far less a burden than cleaning up the forums.

Without letting anything loose on the exact details, this was one of the things discussed at the recent moderator meeting. The FT tech staff were there and there seem to be some pretty good ideas in place that will be implemented.

This also can't really be answered unless we know the amount of effort is involved with moderation of spammers. While you may be right, there will now be more moderator interaction with new members. And even though spammers may be causing a problem today, it may be more limited than having a host of new members sending PMs to moderators.

It is pretty substantial, on average I'd say we see anywhere from 2-10 spammers a day with up to 10 posts. But as I said; the HOM team is aware of the issues and has a package of tools ready to deal with them soon...

From the few mods I've spoken to, well, it's quite a bit of effort. I know that I report at least 2 per month, and that's only from the forums that I visit regularly, which is less that 20% of FT.

I'm glad there's a discussion about it & ideas on the table. ^^

Wow, I didn't realize it was that many! It really would help you guys if there was some way to deal with this fairly automatically.

Regarding the main topic:

It may sound a bit ironic coming from me, since I'm the guy who keeps raising concerns about threads in Travel Buzz, but I am also opposed to keeping new members from starting threads. I think most new folks come here BECAUSE they have a problem no one has been able to solve and when they discover the depth of knowledge on this site, it really starts them on the right track to become strong advocates and members.

However, a somewhat more conservative approach of limiting the number of threads a new member can start to, say, one a week until they have been around a while, might well suffice.

For some of you reading about spammers, I'd like to share some statistics we have in the admin of FlyerTalk. In mid-2004 we changed technology platforms for FlyerTalk and since then, the new platform keeps track of every single action by the mods on FlyerTalk. In the two and a half years on the new platform, there have been 51,716 actions taken by our volunteers. Of that number, 82 percent - 42,407 - of the actions have been related strictly to spammers and commercial messaging. Spammers here are also defined as members who repeatedly re-register over and over again in a disruptive manner as well as those posting commercial messages.

While most only see these volunteer efforts in a single dimension, I think these stats will impress on you just as they have on me the first time i saw them just how valuable a role our volunteers play on FlyerTalk. And a large majority of the other actions are moving threads to more common forums.

As ScottC eluded to, we are working hard on adopting technology to assist these volunteers in this area without restricting the posting privileges of any of our regular members. We will not let spammers win.

i for one certainly made constructive threads when i was new to FT.. trip reports would be another good example of something a new member might want to post in a new thread.

im very impressed with all the recent forum updates, especially with how large the forums are. ^

im sure the reason the details on anti-bot/spam updates are not being shared is to prevent them from being worked-around by the bots/spammers

If there's a way to decrease the workload on the mods without restricting posting by newbies, I'm all for it ^^.

I'd hope that would also take care of all the duplicate ids taken out by people without a life , but getting rid of the commercial spammers would probably go a long way toward reducing the load on the mods.