Crazy amount of spam

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1

Hello everyone!
I wonder if there is anything we can do about the crazy amount of spam messages we see on this forum every week.
Is it possible to require a cooldown period after signing up, i.e. wait a day / week after creating an account before being allowed to post?
I know that is drastic and it will negatively affect genuine posters, but something needs to happen.
There might be better solutions (ban IP addresses from certain countries, pattern recognition, disallow numbers / email addresses in posts?) - I have never moderated or been admin of a discourse forum.

Currently the weekly digest has become absolutely useless like this.
And the forum is heavily polluted.

I suppose it just pains me to see someone do this to our forum :-))

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You mentioned good ideas!
Maybe the backend team can implement one or more.
As I see, this forum uses Discourse. They use spam protection: Discourse AI - Spam detection - Site Management - Discourse Meta

Or maybe switching to another third party commenting system like Disqus?

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Discourse has a problem with IPv6 addresses, showing them all as the same IPv4 address.
We try to solve this.
(We try to host all systems by ourself to avoid discussions about GDPR.)

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Or that you first have to reply to one (Or some other minimal amount) message before you can post. So aftwer becoming a member, you have to show you read the forum and contribute to it before you can have a ‘benefit’.