Question Feature request: Handle SPAM via forum members

After seeing the Kunena forum spammed a lot lately, I thought about a way I (as a community member) could help in cleaning the mess up that these spammers generate.

Kunena (but for that matter every forum software) is a community tool. As a community member I feel 'unhappy' that when I see SPAM on the forum I cannot do much about it other then 'SPAM' the moderator with a message (Report to moderator link).

I think that with a small change in the code we could accomplish the following:

Add in the back-end a threshold for 'report to moderator' clicks, then when threshold is reached take the topic / message automatically offline.
The moderator can then decide (when he/she comes online) if the message is indeed spam (and should be deleted) or not (and made visible again)

threshold = number of different people reporting the topic / message, not the number of times a message is reported.

I think this would help not only me in being able to contribute in a positive way, but also the forum moderators because SPAM has the tendency to always surface when the timing is wrong (and you are not online)

What would make it even better (but is more work) is to have a separate functionality like report to moderator > 'report as spam'

What do you think?

This is a way of dealing with spam after its creation. It's better to have more options and controls to prevent spam being created in the first place.

Hello,

@rudd : with your suggestion you need to store somewhere the number of reported spams for each message, so i think a new column need to be added in kunena_messages table to handle that

There is a setting in Kunena configuration to put messages for user which less a certain number of posts under approved mode.

ShockPuppet wrote: This is a way of dealing with spam after its creation. It's better to have more options and controls to prevent spam being created in the first place.

agree, and in a perfect world that would be enough, but with the number of spam messages I see on this forum alone, it turns out that our world is not that perfect :woohoo:
Spam is always finding a way to 'bypass' preventive measures and in all cases it looks bad on the platform the messages are displayed (and if you have notify on: mailed around)

xillibit wrote: @rudd : with your suggestion you need to store somewhere the number of reported spams for each message, so i think a new column need to be added in kunena_messages table to handle that

There is a setting in Kunena configuration to put messages for user which less a certain number of posts under approved mode.

Agree on the extra column, you need to store the counter somewhere

I know the setting, but how is that working here on this forum? Last week alone there was a lot of spam that I could have easily 'marked' while I was browsing the forum...

I have a forum with about 50.000 members,
there are some traps in this.
People that hate each other will start to report each other,
and at the end everything will be one big report.
For this reason i removed karma too.

Nikiniko wrote: I have a big forum with about 50.000 members,
there are some traps in this.
People that hate each other will start to report each other,
and at the end everything will be one big report.
For this is the reason i removed karma too.

Cool! Not the fact that they report each other but the size of your forum

As administrator you should be able to turn that option of. Not sure if it is also possible to turn of 'report to moderator'?