Member Email Verification Update - first week of June
Hello wonderful community!
As you know, we have been extra focused on safety in the community lately and we've already announced that all members are required to verify their emails to post in the forums. We are excited that this update will be applied to the group support rooms within the next day as well. All members will be prompted to verify their email addresses to access all of the forums as well as the group support rooms.
We recognize that this is a big change which is why we're being mindful to take this as a step-by-step process. As always, safety is a top priority and we are looking forward to seeing this update.
Thank you all for everything you do to keep the community safe and supportive!
Thanks for the update, Kate! Safety is paramount <3
@Kate
Thank you for this update!
You've made me a very happy turtle😃😃❤️❤️
Thank you Kate. Do listeners need to switch to the member a account to do this?
Thanks
Okay, thank you Kate.
Thanks for the update
So is this in effect now? Because wow I thought this would help on the forum spam but no it doesn't.
Well, my final idea was having new accounts not be able to post in the forums until they are a day old...
The forum spammers "verify" fake addresses. There's no need to make people wait a day to post in the forums. Almost all the spam can easily be stopped by preventing anyone from posting links until they are established and trusted as members of our community.
I don't understand why anyone imagines chatroom trolls will not simply "verify" fake addresses too.
Elsewhere someone said there would be no more guest accounts, but I have been chatting to guests in the past few days.
It seems to me we're throwing away anonymity for no gain in "safety in the community" whatsoever.
@Phthalo
@RarelyCharlie Maybe my brain is dying, I swear I remember feeling like "finally they are trying something that can work" but now that I actually read it again I'm like "wait a minute this isn't it".
I didn't mean to sound like I actually believed clicking a link would stop spam. Idk where my mind was when I read this earlier.
@RarelyCharlie - The links thing alone would help in many cases, but not almost all as you stated - these days, we have measures in place that have decreased spam quite a bit (though there is still far too much for me to be happy about it), and what remains is about 50% links and 50% not (e.g., posting a url, but without a hyperlink, spam unrelated to links, etc.). It would certainly be a step in the right direction to limit links, but I don't think we've yet found anything that will fully address the problem, in large part because the people posting this spam continue to adapt based on the measures put in place.
Oh yes, you're right. I was thinking about it as a programmer 
Under the covers there's no difference between a link and a URL, because a link has a URL hidden in it. So I should have said, "preventing anyone from posting URLs" in order to remove both links and URLs.
And there are also the phone numbers, but they are no more difficult to filter than URLs.
I have been measuring the spam levels myself, and I haven't noticed any significant change. So I don't understand how you can be seeing a decrease. Maybe the decrease has been very recent, and I'll see it if I'll run the measure again this week.
I don't see any evidence of adaptation either. A while ago I noticed a couple of listeners accounts posting spam, but none recently. And I noticed a few spam replies that advertised a product with no actual link, but again I haven't seen these for a while.
@Anomalia
Coincidentally I've just come across a spam member profile! That's the first one of those I've seen 
(I flagged it.)
@RarelyCharlie
@RarelyCharlie - Got it - I definitely don't have a programmer background, so didn't realize that in the background URLs and links look the same. Helpful!
Re: reduction, MonBon and I have access to a queue that shows all edited and deleted posts in the forums, and at its peak about 2 months ago, we were substantially higher than we are now. Additionally, there is an automated feature to remove some and so I can see when that is caught and thus know that while it is far from catching all of it, a good chunk does end up in there that didn't always in the past.
A year ago, on Wednesday, June 28th, I counted the spam threads. There were 67 that day.
I counted them again after the captcha had been introduced, on Wednesday, July 26th last year. I counted 88 that day, an increase of 31% in a month.
This week, on Wednesday, June 20th this year, I counted 189, nearly three times as many as a year ago.
The number of genuine threads fell to less than half of the number there were a year ago. The rise in spam and the fall in genuine threads, combined, now result in almost 4 out of every 5 new threads being spam, according to my counts.
It's very possible my counts and your counts are different, because I have no special access. And perhaps more people are removing them, so that most of the time there are fewer to be seen.
It's also very possible there was a spike a couple of months ago and I missed it. A lot of telephone numbers were appearing for a while, but because I have my own spam filter I don't get an accurate sense of how bad the situation is day to day.
@Anomalia
@RarelyCharlie - I definitely agree that from a year ago things are worse. My reference was to relative to a couple months ago when things were at an all time high, and have gotten better since then. By no means do we have a complete solution yet, and I personally agree that disallowing links in your first few posts, etc., could be a solution that fixes a huge portion of this.
@Phthalo The forum aspect has been in effect for a while now. The new aspect for June is the chatrooms.
@AffyAvo Yeah I just realized that I misinterpreted something somewhere. Still hoping for a better measure though...
@Phthalo yeah