Restricting private messages

a couple of weeks ago I had a member use private messages and the email form to contact several other members to try and sell them her book. Most people apparently ignored the message, except for one person who sent me an angry email threatening to jump ship if I allowed this to go on. Of course we have policies against spam in place, and the member had been warned about promoting her book before, so she had to be banned this time. As I explained to the complaining member, I can't and won't monitor Private Messages, so if someone is sending out spam I won't know about it unless somebody tells me. And I have a number of mods already installed to restrict PMs to users who have been around for a few days and made a few posts. Short of turning off the private message and email to user functions entirely, is there anything more I could have done?

 

Create usergroup with tiny PM box. 1? 3?

It would slow things down.

just turn it off PMs for that usergroup only? But then they might sign up for another account to PM people.




All instances on my forum have been behavior issues or spam, so there is a moderated usergroup with tiny PM box to slow the PM spam.

 

Tiny pm box, hmm. Are you talking about making the PM box small in size so that they would have trouble reading back what they typed? If their smart they would copy and paste. Or set the character limit really low, so they could only type a line or two?

 

vBulletin 3.8.X has a usergroup setting where you can limit PMs by increasing the amount of time between messages being sent. Put her in a usergroup and increase that setting. Be annoying.. 180 seconds or 3 minutes between PMs would slow her down.

A small box might seem like a good ideas but she doesn't have to store a copy in her sent messages. If she starts with zero, sends 100 messages but doesn't store sent copies than she still has 0 PMs.

 

Depending on the size of your community... eventually you're going to have to keep your sanity in check about people who flip on the drop of a pin. Tell the person to stop accepting pms if the chance of receiving a piece of spam once a month or so bothers them.

Edit: Another thing I do is limit the maximum number of recipients.

 

Oh, the number of PMs sent at once has been limited to 5 for the longest time, but I hadn't noticed the new time limitation option yet

 

vBulletin 3.8 also has a "Report PM" feature - just like the post reporting system - so that your members don't have to manually tell you about spam PMs.

Personally, I would move her to a nondescript usergroup where Private Messaging is disabled.

Is she an active member of your forum, or did she sign up just to spam your members? What's her post count?

 

Set the number of PMs that can be stored in the PM box to a small number - 3? 1?

Good idea! Long time between sending PMs. Limiting the number of recipients to 1 would be a good idea too.

When the person sending out the PMs sends them out, they will probably get replies and that PM box will fill up when people respond 'don't spam me'. In any event they may miss any PMs from people that want to take them up on the offer being sent, hence the sending out PMs for solicitation would be less than worth while, unless they sent out an url of a site or email contact information.


You could disable PMs altogether but they might just sign up another account and send PMs from that new account.

 

Or you could find out what the book's name was or white site is selling it and just add it to your variable section so if it's going to be:


Jamie Oliver's Cookbook <---> A Silly Cookbook.


It should drive her insane after a while.

 

She had signed up, posted advertising about her book, got warned about it, managed to make a couple dozen decent posts and placed an ad in the Classifieds section where it belonged. Everyone thought she was finally fitting in when the spamming via PM started. It's a shame, really; I can understand wanting to sell your book when business is slow, but I can't have people abusing people's email and PMs like that.

 

In that case, I wouldn't tolerate it. Either ban her or screw with her using replacement variables like Boss recommended.

 

Yep, that's exactly what I did; ban her. Real shame too; she could have been a great member if she didn't constantly try to sell her book.

 

Just wondering, but what was the book about?

 

It was one of those business books that purportedly taught you how to get ahead in business by selling e-books that taught you how to get ahead in business

 

Oh, those. Yeah, banning was a good idea.

 

Limit the amount of PMs she sends, and, tell those that being bothered by her to add the user to the ignore list.