Hello everyone,
Yes, we know. Freesound is under a MASSIVE spammer attack. We’re discussing internally how we will handle this situation. Just deleting the spam message isn’t enough as those &*%$%! spammers are creating spam quicker than we can delete them. A few of the options we are discussing:
- More Captchas (funny words you have to type). All users who haven’t uploaded sounds yet and want to post on the forum will need to fill in the guess-the-squiggly-words thing.
- First-post-moderation. The first post of every new user is moderated. If that post is passed, you’re now free to post. We have enough active forum members to make this work, probably.
- Flood-protection. Right now you’re allowed to post as many messages in a single day as you like. We should limit this to max W per X minutes, max Y per hour, max Z per day. We could get these numbers from looking at the past for our most acive forum members.
- Akismet. Akismet is a -nonperfect- system/service that analyses a text and tells you if it’s spam or ham. Non-perfect because sometimes it flags spam as ham and vice-versa. We have this already running in freesound but right now we’re not doing anything active with the results. I.e. if a post is marked as spam we just store “hey this post is probably spam” but don’t stop the user from posting more.
- No posting more than X url’s in your first post. We used to have this in freesound “1″, we could revisit this idea.
- No posts until you have downloaded at least one sound.
- Some kind of flagging of spam posts + moderation.
- [Post your realistic ideas in the comments here!]
We know that some of these are more work than others, and none of them are perfect solutions; for each of these options you can always come up with a “yes, but ….”. So, we will have to make a choice and implement some of them. This should also apply to sound comments, because I fear the day those $%&#$%# discover those.
Hang on people, this is going to take a while 
- Bram
PS: On a more personal note: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh $&%^@#$$$$!
Then take a picture of yourself with the t-shirt and post it as a reply in 
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