I was thinking today: there are a lot of kinds of human-generated spam that can be blocked by an automated script. (The bot-generated spam is almost always blocked by Akismet.)
- Double posting — Most forums have a rule against this, but it still happens. Sometimes it’s allowed in a certain forum (like the sandbox on my forums), or allowed a certain period of time after the previous post was made.
- Bumping up old topics — Most forums have a problem with this. It is simply not socially acceptable to bring up a conversation from 2001 that hasn’t been posted on since then.
- One-word posting — “lol” is not an acceptable post on any forum I know of. It would be pretty simple to block posts with no spaces in them, and also have a minimum character count per post.
I’ve decided to make a plugin for bbPress that blocks the three types of human-generated spam I just listed. If anyone has any ideas on other things I could block with the plugin, please tell me here.
Edit:
I have completed the development of Automated Forum Moderation‘s first release.
