I’m a voluntary mod for a self-hosted Discourse community. I am not an admin.
I am struggling recently with spam accounts being created and their spam posts. I have asked the admins to look into the Akismet plugin.
My question is; are there any plugins to build a bit of a workflow around the user signup process based on time zone? I don’t thin our admins want to be forced to approve all new users, but if there were a way to implement the following logic:
If new user timezone is “Africa/Juba” then require approval, else auto approve new user
If not currently available, does the API allow such a plugin to be built?
I know there are geolocation plugins, but the IP addresses of the activity I need to block aren’t as consistent as the timezone that is getting recorded into their profiles.
A drawback of blocking or restricting a time zone or IP is that it prevents legitimate users of signing up in that area. The Akismet plugin is a good place to start. Have you had a look at the topic below for some other ideas you could pass onto the admins? Some things such as watched words you could add yourself for example.
Thanks, I saw that link. I did also mention watched words to the admins, but the spammers are getting creative in all the ways spammers do using accented vowels, unicode black/circled numbers and such.
The community is company-related and no-one should be signing up from the time zone I would like to block (which isn’t the one I listed above as exemplar), and my goal would be mainly to flag them for manual review, not block them 100% all the time absolutely no-questions-asked goes to /dev/null.
I realize IPs can be spoofed and VPN’d so I didn’t suggest that. One thing I do know by reviewing the spam accounts is that at least at the moment they aren’t thinking to obfuscate their time zone, and where they are at does not overlap with the footprit of legitimae users of the site.
