Nick Shinn made a good point in one of his posts -- the new filters don't seem to take into account how long someone has been registered at Typophile, yet most spammers have a quite new registration.

I've been thinking about this and believe a good solution would be: if the account is less than six months old, the posts have to go through moderation.

Yes - the antispam modules don't take into account the user account's age, except for catching new accounts as they are created. I'll continue to look into other modules that might dovetail in that might support this function.

@Jared

Does your filtering module have the capability to establish whitelists? If so that might be the best way.

I agree that moderation is the worst solution because new users will post multiple times, not understanding what is happening.

I agree with JamesM: As a new user, my first post today got flagged as spam, and that surprised me. If the message had said "waiting for mod approval since this is your first post", it would feel much more welcoming :)

does it allow users to flag spam?

F Randall Farmer, who's a world authority on community systems, recommends this. he did it for Yahoo Answers, and it was highly effective. the idea being, you don't have to get rid of all spam outright, just slow the spammers down enough to make it uneconomical.

users should remove spam as well. from his book, Building Web Reputation Systems.

Yahoo! Answers decided to let users themselves remove content from display on the site because of the staff backlog. Because response time for abusive content complaints averaged 12 hours, most of the potential damage had already been done by the time the offending content was removed. By building a corporate karma system that allowed users to report abusive content, Yahoo! Answers dropped the average amount of time that bad content was displayed to 30 seconds. Sure, customer care staff was still involved with the hardcore problem cases of swastikas, child abuse, and porn spammers, but most abusive content came to be completely policed by users.

With the final iteration, the designers had incorporated all the desired features, giving historically trusted users the power to hide spam and troll-generated content almost instantly while preventing abusive users from hiding content posted by legitimate users. This model was projected to reduce the load on customer care by at least 90% and maybe even as much as 99%. There was little doubt that the worst content would be removed from the site significantly faster than the typical 12+ hour response time.

Let me try :^)

Training the anti-spam engine

[Edit] In reply to Hrant, below, I just pressed "Edit" and got the old familiar "Edit comment" box. Where does one get into a waiting queue?

[Edit #2] Nope. Sorry, Hrant, it seems to work dandy for me!

I'm guessing that there's a timing trigger for posters who post many messages in a short period of time.

But this was my second post in about five minutes, and no 'please wait'. (Yet) - Herb

And then my second edit in less than a minute. Another theory down the drain :)

Yes, there is a whitelist, of sorts. Not sure what this new delay thing is; I've not seen it anywhere in the settings.

@Chris Hunt: Done

(The rest of you in this thread are already on the whitelist.)