We might also need to restrict with whom probationary users can share their pages. Instead of using forums, they could create pages and make those avaialble to individual users. I guess this could fall a bit into your scenario of preventing spammers to send many messages at once.
The same would go for sending messages to individual users. Human moderation could be a possibility for forum posts, but would not work for user account creation. I've been spending about 1-1.5 hours each day dealing with new accounts. If we simply approved them it would be much less, but since we require users to provide a reason, I see why they sign up and thus actually let them know which Mahara instance they should be using for their uni work instead, ask who their lecturer is so I can get in touch with them. It is primarily students who request a login because their lecturer said they should. However, they don't always check the URL they should use correctly or are just told "Mahara" and then end up on mahara.org. So I'm not just looking out for spam accounts during the approval, but do a qualified approval process which in the long-run is better for the institutions using Mahara as they'll actually be able to have their users on their instances. Since we don't have a global Mahara instance for all and mahara.org is for discussions but not individual portfolios, I feel I have to do the qualified approval / denial as long as we require account confirmation. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Mahara Contributors, which is subscribed to Mahara. Matching subscriptions: Subscription for all Mahara Contributors -- please ask on #mahara-dev or mahara.org forum before editing or unsubscribing it! https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1250641 Title: [ongoing] mahara.org forum spam Status in Mahara ePortfolio: Confirmed Bug description: Mahara gets a steady annoying flow of forum spam. On a typical day it's 5 to 10 messages. This isn't a whole lot, but since the number of messages on mahara.org's forums is fairly low, this makes up about 40% of the messages each day. I'm opening this bug to explore options to deal with this issue. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1250641/+subscriptions _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~mahara-contributors Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~mahara-contributors More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp

