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Had to choose between two moderation tools for my small forum
I run a tiny hobby forum for vintage camera repair, maybe 200 active users. Last month spam bots started flooding in with fake links to crypto sites. I had to pick between Automod and a third party tool called StopForumSpam. Automod was free but I would have to write a ton of rules myself. StopForumSpam cost $8 a month but it checked new users against a big database of known spammers. I went with the paid option because I just dont have time to babysit filters. It stopped 90% of the junk in the first week. But now I am wondering if I gave up too much control over who gets blocked. Has anyone else dealt with this tradeoff on a small board?
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carter.joseph5d ago
Yeah I actually read something about this a few weeks back, some guy on a forum admin blog was talking about how these spam databases can have false positives from IPs that used to be bad but got reassigned by ISPs. Like someone gets a new IP address and suddenly they're flagged because the last guy running that IP was a spammer. So you're not wrong to worry about losing control, but honestly for 200 users and a hobby forum, $8 a month is nothing compared to the headache of writing automod rules from scratch. I've seen people spend weeks tweaking those things and they still get bypassed by new spam patterns. You can always keep an eye on the moderation logs for the first month or two and if you catch any legit users getting blocked, just whitelist them manually.
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Respect the opposite take but paid tools can STILL screw up and ban legit members.
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foster.jordan6d ago
I ran a classic car forum of similar size a few years back and went through the exact same dilemma. I picked the paid tool for the same reason, time is just too limited to write and tweak rules constantly. It worked fine for us, and I never had any complaints from real members getting caught in the filter.
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