Thanks a lot, I've made you a moderator of all conferences (you should see new buttons). So far, the only thing I do as a moderator is to delete the occasional double posts. Sometimes I guess it is also useful to correct a Lilypond post that failed for any reason (but this usually involves me fixing a bug in my extension to the forum software).

And yes, there probably is a good reason why one generally doesn't find the "trusted" idea in practice. Maybe the standard solution of having a moderator decide which posts are spam and which aren't is the way to go if more spam should appear.

Another option would be a captcha, but that would only work against robots. If this was a real person, that's no good. I think the "trusted" idea would work, but it may deter some casual users. And if it's a real person, they may still get by you, and we'd have to go to a moderated forum. Also, at a some point, there may be too many people for you to handle them by yourself. It would be a good problem to have. :-)
I'm willing to help out, whatever you decide.
I think the reason people would spam musipedia is that lyrics and chord sites are very common places for less-than-reputable advertising. Maybe they were thinking this was a lyrics site or something. Oh well.

As a first step, I have restricted posting to registered users. Posts still become visible to the world immediately.


Let's see how the spammers behave now. If it was just a robot, the problem might be solved for now. I would like to avoid becoming a censor.

I have taken a closer look at the forum software. It seems that the moderator approval thing is only a property of a forum, not of a user, so if we want to maintain a forum ("conference") where people can post anonymously and await approval by the moderator, this would either have to be a new one, or all posts, including from registered members, would have to be treated this way.

If the problem persists, I would suggest as a next step that only "trusted" Musipedia users can post. Everybody would be able to become a member of this group by sending me an e-mail requesting it, and all existing members would automatically be put into that group to begin with. Posts would still become visible immediately instead of having to be approved. That would save me some work (only one decision per user instead of one per post). Spammers would lose their "trusted" status by manual intervention from me. To continue spamming, they would then have to regain it by registering again and convincing me that they are different from all people I have put into the trusted group in the past. I would hope that there would then be enough other, simpler ways of sending out spam for spammers to not bother with Musipedia.

Do you have still better ideas?

I'm afraid you will have to do something, seeing today's new spam...

You could combine your two ideas. Registered members' messages will directly appear (giving us the fast reply we've enjoyed so far), while those who do not like to register can submit their message for moderation (but only when you get around...).

Would that be a workable combination of the best of two worlds?

Today I noticed the first instance of spam in the melody forum. I deleted it, but still, everybody who watches the forum got an e-mail quoting the spam message.

While it is flattering that someone thinks Musipedia is a visible enough website to be worthy of posting spam, it raises the question whether I should restrict posting to registered members. That would raise the bar for spammers at least a little bit - I could block or delete their user ids so that they have to at least register once per spam message. On the other hand, it makes using the forum unnecessarily hard for normal users. Or, I could go even one step further and make the whole thing a moderated forum, so that only messages I think aren't spam become visible (but only when I get around to looking at them).

What do you think? should I leave it open, restrict it to registered users, or even go all the way and make it a moderated forum?