Idea - if it's not hard to implement

[rachmaninoff]

There's a feature in PF right now that prevents users from posting the identically same post twice within a particular thread. (edit: I tried it and it doesn't work! Was it removed recently?) If it were a feasible task to extend this to the whole board - it would mitigate two different problems:

(i) Homework questions, copied & pasted onto five different subforums, causing confusion and the merging of threads; and

(ii) Spammers, copying & pasting spam at high speed - they sometimes go on rampages around 2:00-4:00 AM (when the mods are asleep...) and leave PF defiled until the morning hours; :grumpy: this would undermine that particular tactic. In fact there's one spammer doing that right now as I type - the soon-to-be-banned "John Varta" was my inspiration for this post.

Just my $0.02

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Interesting idea. However, neither problems you've expressed are serious, but this is an option if they do. Also I see a problem with performance. Each time someone posted a new thread or reply a full table scan would be required.

 

[rachmaninoff]

Also I see a problem with performance. Each time someone posted a new thread or reply a full table scan would be required.

Would it though? It would only be needed to check the very most recent posts by the same user - and that history is already collected in the current system (the "view recent posts by *** " function). AFAIK it's computationally easy to compare short text files like PF posts?

 

[rea]

checksums, hashes, should work CRC and things like that... but for example "bUT" is diferent that "bUt", then if the spammer have a app for do that, (tought the reading of the message will become mess), the hashes would difer... tought, before you pass the string to the functions, perhaps would be good to pass it to a function that lowercase the message, then do the checksum,hash, etc. and add the check sum to a table..., then do a fast comparation of hash via the data base fast search...