New user auto-silenced with no option to approve?

Product Support

AI-generated summary

A new user was auto-silenced for typing too fast—likely due to pasting a large pre-written post—which triggered spam detection. The admin, bts, manually unsilenced the user, but the system re-silenced them on retry, highlighting a lack of admin override for such cases. bts noted confusion because, per a 2016 post by codinghorror, blocked new-user posts were supposed to go to an approval queue—but here, no notification or approval option appeared. codinghorror confirmed the behavior is intentional to deter spam and pointed to the site setting notify mods when user silenced, which bts enabled after discovering it. codinghorror explained the setting isn’t default because spammers are persistent. bts concluded their forum has been lucky, seeing few such cases—possibly due to WordPress SSO acting as a barrier or low spam targeting.

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.

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: