Thread

I will hit him up and see if he is willing. Lemme pre-emptively as you if all the hooks needed are there. I know nothing about them, but I know that often when I ask a developer to do something out of the ordinary, I sometimes get that back as a response 😉

Yep, submission hooks are sitting pretty in the forum and wiki modules.

http://expressionengine.com/developers/extension_hooks/forum_submit_post_start/
http://expressionengine.com/developers/extension_hooks/edit_wiki_article_end/

For the wiki, defacing is a built in expectation, and revisions are always kept, so the extension fires after the article is submitted; if it was found to be spam, it would need to be removed or closed instead of being a road block to submitting at all.

is it possible to “moderate” the forum by having moderators/administrators APPROVE a forum post?

just like with blog comments, where we can approve a post before it actually appears on the site.

Not as a native feature, pirco, though it could be accomplished with an extension, not displaying any post that wasn’t marked as approved in some manner that your extension would specify.

thanks derek. alas, I’m not an extension developer…

dru, wanna put some money in the pot for a developer to make that extension?

I’d say one good feature of such an extension would be to allow “auto-approve”
(so, the admin/moderator gets an email with the forum post, and two links – one to “approve this post” and one to “approve all future posts from this user”)

anyone?

How far can this be taken?

I can see some power here. What if all members who have less than, say, 5 approved posts, are in moderation. But once you have 5 approved posts, your posts are just freely posted without moderation? That would probably eliminate a ton of the forum spam, used in conunction with Low NoSpam 😊 Is that extensionable??

not sure if it’s appropriate to mention here but I’d be willing to pay a developer decently to come up with this extension (with at least with basic functionality such as auto-approve after 5 posts). this would cut down my time to moderate and time is money, as they say.

Seems like I also recall an extension that didn’t accept submissions from anyone within 24 hours of registering.  A bit heavy handed, but depending on your community, it’s another possibility.

I’d say one good feature of such an extension would be to allow “auto-approve”
(so, the admin/moderator gets an email with the forum post, and two links – one to “approve this post” and one to “approve all future posts from this user”)

That’s an elegant solution. Add a link to delete and/or ban the member, too.

I’m about to implement a module like this, but based on a profanity word list. i bet i could modify it to work with other spam prevention mechanisms/rules. Coming from another cms (drupal) i was a bit disappointed to see the forum module is not using core comments. For the core comment my module does already work.

So the idea is to write a module that has a seperate database of moderation status of a posting.
to write the status can be easily achieved with the mentioned hook during post submission.
I’m not sure how to block the view of the posting if it has a blocked status.

any ideas?

Actually, I had same problem. I started forum, and in a month I had so much spam on it and so much fake accounts I didn’t know what to do at first.
Then I changed settings, even though my customer wanted differently, and I turned on default captcha, registration through link AND i banned all visitors from “exotic countries”. My theory was, that since nobody will pay for advertising for people from pakistan or angola, or coite’d'ivory, Zimbabve and similar countries, I just used default possibility of EE forum and banned all users from such countries.
If your portal is for example local, then ban everybody from other countries ... advertisers know how many target visitors you have, you can have milion people from Zimbabve, but if your target visitors are from, for example, Norway, you can just ban everybody else, you will not get payed for rest of visitors, that visits will not count anywhere ... so why bother?

Oh, yes, I have mail for every post and every member that registers, and in mail I have links to web service and with that automatically generated link I can delete post or member, or ban by just clicking ...

not always an option. looking to write an extension for every usecase.

I personally believe in the Death Penalty for Spammers.  Considering all the man hours they make us waste.  Alternatively, a few hours in a pain amplifier each day would also suffice.

spam is a give background noise in the internet. it’s evil but will always be there.
the challenge is how to deal with it, and EE doesn’t seem to do anything in this regard with the forum module.