Hi there,
"Also, no option for contribution the first 2 days or so after sign-up would a good idea." - Ultrech
Might be a risk that new posters with genuine, maybe even urgent, questions would be losing out.
Just realized, it's travelguide not forum. Sorry. I should never touch a keyboard when I'm tired.
[ 10-Sep-2010, at 14:10 by fabyomama ]
"Also, no option for contribution the first 2 days or so after sign-up would a good idea." - Ultrech
Might be a risk that new posters with genuine, maybe even urgent, questions would be losing out.
Just realized, it's travelguide not forum. Sorry. I should never touch a keyboard when I'm tired.
No problem, but glad you mentioned it anyway. The difference is that in the forum many users will start asking genuine questions as soon as they are logged in. At the travelguide, in 98% of the cases people who do start directly after being logged in, are mostly spammers.
Hope that some of other regular contributors, or admins, will have a look into the options.
Also, blocking the IP-adress of people who just log on under a different name, might be a good option. Happened now: new name, same spam in the guide. Those people really need a life.
I'm pretty loath to block anyone from doing anything right after signing up to be honest. We've toyed with this idea in the forums before too when spam got better, but can you imagine the great new users you might piss off? You don't get a second chance at a first impression, and I think this might apply double for websites
But yes, we do need better mechanisms in place in the guide, especially as they are now getting more and more focus and visibility across the site. One thing I do nearly every day is go through all the newest forum threads and blog entries just to make sure no spam has been missed there. I use a feed reader for that, but there's no feed yet for the most recently updated wikis or most recently started wikis. At the very least a feed showing all the latest edits made by first timers would be a big help. The benefit of having it come in as a feed is that this puts it on the same page for me to check as all the other feeds, so more likely to mean swifter action.
But there is also another issue, and that's what constitutes spam in the travel guides. There is the obvious stuff, but then there's things like a guesthouse owner adding their own guesthouse. To me, that isn't spam in the wiki, but if they posted a new thread in the forum with nothing but their guesthouse listing, it would be classified as such.
Probably need to setup some standards to deal with cases like this more consistently in the not too far future!!
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