Question Ideas to fight Bot/Spam posts?

[neogunhero]

It’s no secret this forum has a bot account/spam posting problem. It’s hard to fully prove it with evidence, but a lot of posts that I sum up under “spam posts” seems to be written with some sort of AI or LLM.

What are some ways we can combat this without making new prospective posters feel out of place/unwelcome? Perhaps imposing stricter account creation criteria? I’m not sure if PCG Forums uses Captcha to make an account or not, and I am unsure of the effectiveness of implementing it.

At the end of the day it is just a very minor annoyance, not even an inconvenience on us who post regularly here. Just ever so slightly annoying to see a random post where the only contents are advertising for a game, or a post that sounds too close to what an AI would write.

I care about the future of forum websites and want to make sure people can find us in this tiny corner of the internet and feel welcome, just like everyone here has made me feel. If I were a soon-to-be forum poster, I feel like I may be discouraged if the forum was full of bots and spam. This may be a problem that doesn’t have an absolute solution, but perhaps we can work with the website devs on fixing problems like this.

 

[Pifanjr]

From what I understand, at least 90% is already caught before it ever becomes visible and whatever does slip through is often deleted within a day and/or the user is banned.

I don't think there's that much more that can be done outside of adding an additional moderator.

 

[Colif]

We can't ban users based on us thinking they are AI. We sort of need proof... most of the time this shows up after a few posts... that is why you don't see a lot of it.

You don't see most of it... we don't see most of it. Most of it doesn't even get onto forums. We have pretty good filters that stop it at the door.

Its an arms race and there currently is no winner.

 

[Zloth]

It's FAR FAR better than it was just a few years ago. I've got to hurry to get spam reported before it vanishes!

 

[Colif]

It's FAR FAR better than it was just a few years ago. I've got to hurry to get spam reported before it vanishes!

Yes, it was interesting here 4 or so years ago. You wouldn't have had to look hard to find it back then. There are times it can get on, if a new approach is taken, but for most part its quiet and peaceful around here compared to the past.