CleanTalk.org Now Used Here

[iacas]

For the past few days, based on comments in another topic, I've been using CleanTalk.org to help filter spam. You can find out more about the platform here: https://cleantalk.org/.

Overall, it's been pretty great, and I strongly recommend it.

The Pros:

• It's greatly reduced the amount of time my moderators need to spend working and moderating posts, users, etc. by flagging them as spammers, issuing warnings, etc.
• It stops posts as well as registrations.
• It has a relatively simple interface that lets you mark things as NOT spam.
• I haven't seen any false positives yet. Those, as you can imagine, are MUCH worse than false negatives as real users can get upset.
• You can block entire countries from posting and/or registering.
• Their database seems to be fairly large and/or complete, resulting in high accuracy.
• I haven't noticed any slowdown of posts.
• It's pretty darn inexpensive.
• Established members don't seem to have their posts vetted. That's good.
• I'm able to remove CAPTCHAs and other things that reduce the odds of a valid user registering and posting.

The Cons:

• The first night, I got a 502 Gateway error every other or third time I loaded up the log. This hasn't happened since.
• There's not as much transparency as I'd like. I don't even know right now how many posts a user has to make before they're considered established and their posts aren't scanned.
• https://community.cleantalk.org/index.php Their forum isn't particularly busy. Which could be seen as a good thing…

For the users here, particularly long-time users, nothing is any different. You should get fewer notifications of spammers being identified and warned, but that's about it.