User/post moderation improvements meta

[jordanjay29]

A meta topic for all UX improvements for user/post moderation.

[luceos]

Add "ban and prune" option to user control menu, which:

• suspends the user permanently
• removes all discussions of said user without replies
• replaces all replies of said user with a "this user was banned"

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Instead of deleting a post, give the option to mod the post with a message. The message can be made visible to the public. If it is not made public the message will only be visible to the author of the post.

[pflstr]

In my opinion, there are three main components to the spam problem:

a) Make it more difficult for spammers b) Make it less rewarding for them c) Involve regular users for occasional low level mod activity

All three components should affect normal users as little as possible, so we should identify any behaviour and reward, that differentiates between spammers and legit users.

Not all spammers are bots. But human spamming is more costly for the spammers, so they will do it only, if the reward is high enough. Not so much with bots. Therefore a) and b) should be both addressed.

Achieving a) is quite difficult. Once Flarum becomes more popular, spammers will invest more and more time to perfect automatic registering. We would need a constantly changing login mechanism, which would require the spammers to constantly update their own routines, so the cost becomes unreasonably high. At the same time, registration of normal users who mainly follow visual registration guides shouldn't be affected.

b) can be achieved more easily. E.g. automatically attach an intransparant not public tag to discussions, where the first post of a recently registered user (or a user with a small number of posts) contains a link, where the title resembles an URL etc., a kind of soft-flagging. This wouldn't bother normal users, but I'm quite sure, that spammers would find out quite fast, that their reward is diminished substantially. To go further, links in this kind of posts could be put in quarantine until approved by moderation.

c) Soft-flagged posts like those described in b) could also be approved by trustworthy non-mod users. In the case of such a trustworthy user viewing a soft-tagged discussion, a pop-up could be shown: Do you think this post is legit? Most spam can be identified by nearly everyone, it's not rocket science. And as these posts are not flagged at all right now, these users can't do much harm, if they approve a post, that shouldn't. If they don't, the soft-flag becomes a hard-flag and the post will still be seen by a moderator.

I agree to every critic of this kind of sophisticated approach. It's no easy feat, but then, no easy feat will be effective against spam. And having an effective anti spam mechanism could become a major differentiating feature of flarum, well worth of investing a considerable amount of brain-storming.

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