Can we either stop new registrations, or have more robust bot filtering?

If you use this site a lot, like me, you'll know that the bot problem we have has been ongoing for over the last decade and a half.

Is there no better way to solve this? There's posts out there that have been reported several times but not removed for boner pills and stupid drugs gummies, and it's bringing the quality of the forum down.

Can we not have something done about this?

There's posts out there that have been reported several times but not removed for boner pills and stupid drugs gummies, and it's bringing the quality of the forum down.

I mean, have you seen some of my Amico posts and @imunbeatable80's infamous opinions on Super Mario 3D World? Arguably it's a wash, if not an improvement.

I don't think a pause on new registrations would be good but what might be good would be to autohide any posts by users with less than a month on the site that get flagged until a moderator can check them. The problem is that moderator time is limited so even if a lot of people flag stuff it can hang around for awhile and get lost in the shuffle. Given the state of the forum I doubt there's a lot of malicious flagging going on so hiding stuff that gets flagged from new users until it can be checked might be a good balance, if it's technically possible.

I feel the easiest fix would be to limit new users ability to create new threads for X amount of time.

The boys could still post spam comments in ongoing threads, but a single comment in an ongoing discussion is easier to overlook and less disruptive than the threads that clutter this place up most mornings.

I can ping @dtoast because I do think there are other proposals worth considering, but stopping new registrations is something I can say is not on the table. There are authentic new users trickling from the outside Fandom-based networks/sites to here and it's been a lifeline.

The spambot issue has existed for a while and it's generally a universal issue even dating back to the Whiskey Media and CBS days. During the monthly meetings we have, the mods on GameFAQs bring this up, the GameSpot mods do, and so do I. That's not to say counter measures have not been attempted on Giant Bomb or elsewhere. When you put a cap on the number of posts, the bots go to creating more accounts. The reality is that Chat GPT-4 "solved" reCAPTCHA last year and that first barrier of defense is basically gone. The automatic spam detection tool (Terminator) is good at eventually nuking spambots that drop posts that vomit out links, but it is not so great with the bots using Chat GPT to create summary writing pieces. Hell, I would even say it's getting harder to judge the Chat GPT summaries from real human-based ones every day, but that's a different issue.

All I can say is I think there are some ideas here worth considering and I can promise to bring them up when the time comes.

@zombiepie: Well said. Even on Fandom's wiki side it is a pretty consistent issue and requires their own team(SOAP) for handling all the spam. I have and will continue to raise these concerns but often times it turns into a game of whac-a-mole. Though it is one I'll keep playing.