New user auto-silenced with no option to approve?

support
1

Just had a user get blocked (“silenced”) by system while trying to make their first post, for reason = typing too fast. The user mentioned he was copying something written in another document so that makes sense. But a bit confusing trying to resolve this as an admin:

  1. I went in and manually un-silenced the user and told him to try posting again. But when he did, same thing happened. Maybe it would make sense to turn off the auto-block measures in the case an admin has manually overruled it?

  2. In this post from 2016 @codinghorror mentions that “blocked posts by new users always come into the approval queue” — but we didn’t get an admin notification here, it seems this user went straight to “silenced” with no way to approve or not. Only saw it happened at all b/c the user emailed us. If it were the case that this was flagged w/ option to approve, that would be :+1: too!

2

Is this new user pasting in the content of their first post? That’s highly consistent with spam behavior.

3

Yes they said they have a large topic prepared and saved elsewhere…I can see how it makes sense to flag as suspicious, just would like to have a way to manually verify in that case.

4

I believe there is a site setting for this, did you look there? Check under notify mods when user silenced. That’s all you need.

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5

Ah thanks, didn’t see that, just turned it on (maybe that setting should be enabled by default…)

6

We usually don’t want that, because the spammers are very persistent.

7

Gotcha. Then we’ll consider ourselves lucky; I believe this is the first possible-spammer-auto-silence we’ve seen, in several months of active forum! Possibly b/c Wordpress SSO is an extra barrier, or we’re just not a big enough target yet :slight_smile:

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