Effective antispam on myCast

I am a fairly experienced operator on forums and other communities, and naturally part of that is working with spam. In this thread I'll get into specifics with how to deal with spam, including where this site is falling short. These options hinge on time, money, and manpower to execute, so I don't expect all this to happen or be considered immediately. I may have missed things based on my inexperience: I am an outsider peering in and I am not intimately familiar with other issues the forum may have. Food for thought to help administrators set some goals. I don't expect to turn up much after this but you can solicit my further input if desired.

Lets start with current measures:

Forum posting delay.

This reaction is crude, to be frank. The fact it only sets a timer and I could in theory spam after is not ideal. As a hypothetical spammer I can immediately upon registration create publicly reachable spam stories or profile information:

https://www.mycast.io/stories/a-story-of-mycast-and-100mg-of-kmora-jelly

https://www.mycast.io/profiles/197851/username/raidarr

As a new user I could have been spamming in this thread already without review or flagging just by being dormant a bit. This is the problem and at the heart of suggestions to come.

The second measure is 'hire more staff'.

Obviously easier said than done. Clearly at least one new moderator has showed up recently and I've heard there is more time for admin attention. My impression is that the new moderator was figuratively handed a gun and told 'go shoot spambots'. It's something but it is not definitive. The moderator seems unable to address lingering accounts which are not considered new. Sleepers and compromised old accounts are an infamous venue for spam. They seem to have few tools except for reactionary whack a mole and there doesn't seem to be much of a 'team' to coordinate with, following suggestions will consider how to empower them. But for one it is obvious the team structure needs to expand somewhat as this site is humble in size, but has attracted an audience.

I think two factor authentication would be more effective.

2FA is a fine suggestion for general account security. It is draconian to require for every account that registers, which is why I passed it up as a suggestion relating to antispam. You say "more effective" but I doubt it is more effective on its own than the half dozen or so combined thoughts presented here in facing spam (without serious compromises to user experience).

Some other user here once suggested an idea about banning/blocking disposable emails, which i think is where those spammer accounts came from. That way, people are able to create multiple spam accounts as well as trolls creating duplicate/clone accounts either for trolling or voting manipulation. So i think it's time for this website to prevent disposable emails from signing in. I agree on blocking VPNs and Proxies, because several of the recent spammer accounts had been using VPN with their IPs registered from other countries (from what i saw, the spammers' main domain are usually located in countries like India, Vietnam, South Africa and China. But sometimes changed to US, UK, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Uganda etc.)

<blockquote>2FA is a fine suggestion for general account security. It is draconian to require for every account that registers, which is why I passed it up as a suggestion relating to antispam. You say "more effective" but I doubt it is more effective on its own than the half dozen or so combined thoughts presented here in facing spam (without serious compromises to user experience).</blockquote>

Perhaps 2FA can be part of the accounts settings.

It is good to have in general, yes. And as a matter of practice it would be reasonable to require everyone with moderator access and above to use it - as long as there are options and it is not shoehorned in one single venue, ie, the abusable email sms pushes, and there is some documentation on handling it responsibly so people do not brick their accounts easily.

<blockquote>It is good to have in general, yes. And as a matter of practice it would be reasonable to require everyone with moderator access and above to use it - as long as there are options and it is not shoehorned in one single venue, ie, the abusable email sms pushes, and there is some documentation on handling it responsibly so people do not brick their accounts easily.</blockquote>

Yeah I agree.

A report button! Let us report users for spam!

<blockquote>A report button! Let us report users for spam!</blockquote>

I would love that idea and maybe have there be some restrictions on it to avoid drama on here too.

CAPTCHA too might help.

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