Shoe advertisements and chatbot necromancers

[Nathaniel3W]

We seem to get a lot of shoe-related spam. And it looks like someone has made a chatbot necromancer that goes around finding old threads, responding to them with semi-relevant netspeak, and hiding a link the signature.

I admire their perseverance to sell us running shoes and whatever else they're trying to do. But it does get a little annoying. Is there any way to stop it?

 

[Xilef]

Social sign in for registration (Steam/Google/Twitter/Facebook) would almost completely eradicate the problem, but that will take some effort implementing.

Another alternative would be to only allow new users to make a single post which is only visible to staff and needs approval: once it is approved they can post regularly. Lets people create accounts to lurk (could have a message up top saying "make a post to get your account approved") and if they want to spam then they can only get 1 shot, only staff can see it and that's that. Actual real users can lurk until they feel the need to post, make a good post, then have their account approved.

The reasons to not do this is that it depends on forum staff being around, we currently have a low new user registration/post rate (they all seem to be for my Android MV tutorial) so I don't think that's a problem. If the forum explodes with popularity then that would be the time to upgrade/migrate forum software and implement social sign-in.