Posts are next to impossible to submit - anyone else had this issue?

[Susan Otcenas]

Theresse9 - I approved your post as well.

[administrator]

There could be a combination of factors at play here.

First, if any new members had trouble registering in the past couple of weeks, we had an email configuration issue that prevented new account confirmation emails from being sent, so new members weren't able to log in and post.
Theresse9 was impacted by this configuration problem. We've fixed the problem, so the account activation issues should no longer be occurring.

As far as spam goes, posts from new forums members are automatically held for manual review if they contain any URLs (links). Additionally, we subscribe to a spam filtering service that holds posts for moderation if they contain "suspicious" content, as defined by the spam filtering service, which "learns" from posts reported as spam across all of the participating forums.

Finally, we also look for common spam words (viagra, etc) and hold posts for manual review if they contain any of those words.

After a certain number of posts, a user become trusted and is subject to a lower level of spam filtering. I believe the threshold is 20 posts -- we had to increase it from the old threshold of 4 posts, because spammers were rapidly submitting large numbers of posts and becoming "trusted" forum members even before we had a chance to discover and ban them.

[Triskeliongirl]

Welcome New Members!! Please bear with the efforts that Susan and Jeff take to keep spammers of our board. This is really a wonderful community of women, so please keep contributing! If you haven't already figured it out, the getting to know you thread is a great place to start.