Approving a new user posts that contains links

OK. So now we are seeing an increase in spam posts esp. using AI to generate plausible looking posts.

Is there a way to require a review of posts which:

  • Are made by TL0; and
  • Contains a link (http://)?

Currently the first x posts are reviewed, but esp. with AI, spammers post x amount of innocuous posts before posting the spam links.

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Change this setting to Trust level 1

Found in Admin settings section.

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Itā€™s a sledgehammer approach, but worth considering!

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Maybe. But that will do exactly what you want. Any tl0 new members who post a link will goto moderation. I believe.

Easy to test change setting and use a test user with tl0 to post a link.

Plus if youā€™re using Discobot onboarding. Just completing the tutorial will bump their user level.

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Ah. From the description it sounds like if you are TL0, you cannot make a post if it contains a link.

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Okay just tested. Sledgehammer it is.

It will not let a Topic or post creation if contains a link tl0.

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You could change the ā€˜newuser max linksā€™ site setting to 0 to prohibit new users from posting links. However, that would also affect posting in general

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Yes, there seems to be 2 ways to prevent new users from posting links.

Iā€™m wondering if there is a way to allow new users to post links, but have those posts go into moderation before being visible.

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Just tested that, after finding. It is the same as changing allowed group form tl0 to tl1.

New topic & posts are blocked if Max New User Links set from 2 to 0

I think it works both individually but not in combination. You could require approval for all users except those in ā€˜approved groupsā€™, and you could require approval for all posts containing links using watched words. But both would cause more posts to need approval.

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I would suggest maybe at present to make a feature request. As this is a very reasonable idea.

This was my initial thought, hoping to be able to specify groups that can bypass it and setting that to the trust_level_1 group. Sadly there is no such bypass option.

We would also love to have this combination as such generated posts would be removed before they are publicly available:

Recognizing that e.g. this posts has two different links is quite difficult for a ā€œnormalā€ user.

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I think this style of slipping an extra link in at the end of another was recently raised in this topic as well - Spam alert: sneaky spammers

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