I hate doing this, but having run other forums I know it's effective.

Got back from the ride today and I've a couple of PM's letting me know that a user named Stephanie had sent them some spam trying to convert them to buddhism. So I go check, and it appears that Stephanie had PM'd 65 people in the two days that she was a member here.

Obviously I've banned her, but then 65 people had to receive spam for enough of you to let me know so that it could happen.

I have a very low tolerance of spam. Actually, I don't have a tolerance for it.

I can stop some forum spam but I can't do a thing about PM spam. Not without taking away PM permissions. Which is what I've done.

Basically you gain PM privileges by simply doing 2 things:

1. Your user must be at least 2 days old
2. You must have posted at least 5 times

Once both of those requirements are met, then you get:

• PM privileges.
• Anything else that we might deny brand new users who we don't yet know.

It's not a reflection on the newbs, it's just an acceptance that with spam being prevalent we'll give full permissions after a very low threshold has been passed... the notion being that spammers generally reveal themselves before that threshold and that very few to no spammers will put the time and energy in to cross the threshold.

So... new members and anyone with less than 5 posts. It's a very low threshold, just wait a couple of days or post a few times and you'll have full access to everything.

I've also upped the PM storage limit to 10,000. First person to reach it, let me know so that I can up it again.

It's a shame, but i guess it has to be done. Maybe you could impose a time limit between the number of PM's newbies can send? Say 1min? This would be enough to put off spammers.

I wanted to do that, but the time period for sending PM's is a global setting and not a usergroup setting. So instead I've turned off PM's for newbies. I've set the threshold really low though, so it doesn't take much to get PM's.

okely dokely