Spam protection - Ideas and questions

Question

Hi,

before I release my new Q&A website I want make sure there will be no spam on this site in future.

There are three things I noticed that spammers could abuse.

1. Invisible links: >>> will this link be visible? <<<

- My solution: I disabled the WYSIWYG editor.

2. Broken re-captcha

- Possible solution: A plugin for user defined (by admin) questions and answers. The user have to answer a question to pass the registration like "What is bigger? An elephant or a cat?"

3. Time-delayed spam: People write a question or answer. They wait a day and edit their posting to insert a spammy link and the admin/moderator never notice it.

- Possible solution: A plugin where you can define a time window for editing own postings like 10 minutes. Works great for my vBulletin forum.

 

If there are any solutions for these issues, let me know. Otherwise I will start to figure out how to write plugins for q2a :-)

Answer 1

"there will be no spam" you bet :) they always find ways... at least humans will post spam, this cannot prevented. But bots you can kill:

1. use a filter module to filter http:// links or to blacklist links

2. just use the default recaptcha or the premium plugin Stop-Spam-Captcha

3. I once did a core hack for this, see http://www.question2answer.org/qa/13137/disable-option-question-after-certain-hacking-page-question

Hope that helps.

Tip: As soon as you have a spammer, use q2a to block his IP.

Comments

Hi, I wrote a "Basic anti-spam configuration for Question2Answer" so it may helps to somebody http://www.jasom.net/basic-anti-spam-configuration-for-question2answer