Echo JS 0.11.0

Why not include a report feature?

It may be too late for this but what about making the forum invite only? This would require setting up the whole invite code system but it might be worth it.

The worst part is that spam posts all make to the RSS feed, my primary summary for Echo JS. So yes for every action that could mitigate this.

I would have contributed to new features for this forum, but the irony of a JavaScript community on a Ruby platform is concrete, and I don't know Ruby ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But there *are* cases where something more could have be done. Spam posts were prompt removed, but spammers weren't banned. As you said, new account could be easily created, but it's still a nuisance, even for them.

We had a similar problem on http://www.rubyflow.com/ - a similar Ruby community site. Our solution for a long time was to only include items from "approved" users in the RSS feed. This worked very well but then people got annoyed they weren't added to the approved list and we didn't have enough mods to catch up with it.

So now we have the RSS feed on a 3 hour delay from the live site which means spammy posts are often reported or moderated away before they hit the RSS feed. It's not absolutely ideal but works given the circumstances. To create such a delay involves only the most basic of tweaks to the query that fetches the items for the RSS feed.

I agree... I've thought about trying to get the app running locally, etc.. so I can try and maybe create a node/js version of the site, running against the same database.  I don't remember enough ruby to be productive at all in the codebase either.

I don't think there is good solution against spamming. You can block up address of spammer but they will use VPN or proxy.
You can filter url but they will use link shortener. You can use captcha, but it won't stop human. You can blacklist some words in title (like crypto) but it can possibly interfere with real code article.

Even beyond the link shortener, there are a few domains apparently in a spam filter for the submission, so the authors now submit a blurb with the url in the blurb.  I don't know what the honestly expect, there's rel=nofollow on all the links here, it's not like they gain SSO from this site.

As to comments on deleting accounts, it's really easy to create an account... and even then, a lot of it may be done manually so that even if you delete an account a new one could be created, even with a captcha etc.

A lot of the spammy articles are from accounts that only have one article posted.  Requiring X karma (at least an upvoted comment or something) might help the bulk of it.