Scratch

How about only people who are approved by a moderator or scratch team member can post images. You could make a certain criteria which a scratch member must first be eligable to be able to post images (e.g. been a respectful member on the site for more than x months and has greater than y posts). If someone is approved the moderators can turn their images privileges on and if they abuse it off again.

According to what coolstuff has said, this was the right thing to do... will this stay forever, though?

Maybe after a week (when everything's hopefully cooled down), the images could be restored? And if it happens again... disable images again. >_<

Last edited by Jonathanpb (2010-06-11 01:35:57)

ScratchReallyROCKS wrote:

Why would anyone want to spam this website 

Because of the high PageRank (7). Something about this.

mathematics wrote:

By the way, why isn't the [url]tag disabled for signatures? Spammers can also spam there.

You can't get a signature until your account is 14 days old, and most spammers won't wait that long.

Maybe we could make it so you can't post images or links until your account is a certain age, too. Then again, new users might have a good reason to post them...

Last edited by hmnwilson (2010-06-11 04:07:31)

WHAT?!!!! Someone posted *? [eew][/eew]. This is an EDU site!!!!!!! Its like posting a "Take Drugs" ad on a university site! However, maybe this is going a teeeeny bit far, you know?

what-the wrote:

helltank wrote:

WHAT?!!!! Someone posted *? [eew][/eew]. This is an EDU site!!!!!!! Its like posting a "Take Drugs" ad on a university site! However, maybe this is going a teeeeny bit far, you know?

It is disturbing that people will do that to a site aimed at children. If it gets worse they could get the police involved in tracking the affenders down, thats what would happen if this site was located in Australia because those images are illegal.

It is also illegal in Singapore, my country... but that is off topic. Anyways, I agree with you. Did you know there are 5 year olds on Scratch?

sparks wrote:

It's terrible that someone would do such a thing on a site that has so many young users. I can see how dealing with the problem is difficult, and I agree with the measures you have taken to stop this, but only as a temporary solution. Somone posted above:

"why are signature images not blocked?" to which someone replied that spammers would not want to wait 14 days to post a sig. As it is, I think that perhapse that's the long term solution, no images until 14 days of forum activity would be automatic and thus not require moderators and if someone posts an inappropriate image or link they will be banned.

I don't know how much this site knows about the computers of the users but I would think you at least have our IP address so I would strongly suggest banning their IP from creating new accounts?

Banning an IP address doesn't work very well because people can have a dynamic IP address (Most do).

What we really need to do is to find a way to block their MAC address as this is harder to change but from what I know you can only ban a MAC address on an individual network not over the internet. (Only other option is a virus which blocks them)

You could figure out a solution where a member of the scratch team gives you a cookie and if you have that on your computer you can post images, if you don't then you can't.

I mean a computer cookie, not one you bake. 

This is becoming complicated ...

Perhaps you could make the scratch forum less enticing to commercial spammers by adding:
rel="nofollow" to external links.
It's like telling google that you don't endorse links to any external sites, and they won't get better results on google for spamming. 

And here's FluxBB developers (the software running the scratch forums) talking about adding anti spam in core. 

I read somewhere that there are extensions for some of these, but I didn't find them yet.

(although it may not help the picture problem and trolling,..)

Last edited by JTxt (2010-06-11 12:22:37)

Sigh. I hate spammers. They have to ruin it for EVERYONE. MUST they?!?!
Spammer: die images die!!!
Ugh. *RIIIIIIIINNNNNNGG!* Rats! My Videogamaphone is ringing!
Gotta go get it. Anyway, like they say, "A rotten apple ruins the barrel."
*RING!* I'M COMING! *picks up phone*
Cyrus: AAAAUUUGH! IMAGES HAVE BEEN DISABLED!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! WHYYYYYY!
Me: Zip it. Scream about here. *hangs up phone*
HOW DID CYRUS KNOW?!?! wait..... I just spammed!
Anyway, younger people probably said exactly what Cyrus said. *SCREAM*

I've gotten tons of new pictures for a thread on the new pokémon games, now my thread looks terrible and i can't put up the new pictures 

How about this:

We turn on images for today and/or tomorrow and see if anything goes wrong. If it does, we can turn them off again and troubleshoot.

It's not fair at all for the entire community to suffer from a couple of trolls posting some *.

So, as Ronald Reagan would say,"Mr. Lightnin, tear down this wall!"