Forum is full of spam

Do you need some help with the spams? In the last 2 weeks there are more spammers than real content. Is this the end of the forum?

Can you make name compulsory on sign-up? I know it'll be soon hacked by the spam bots, but for now it looks like it might be one good step.

Can you add captcha?

Can you make some forum members moderators so they can remove abusive posts and block their user from further posting (at least until a Garmin employee unblocks them)?

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  • The Discussion forum should be cleaned up now, but I'm not hopeful it's gonna remain that way. I'll see about the other  forums.

  • In all the years i've been active on the forum i can count the amount of times i needed to post a link on 1 hand i think and in most cases users could come away by posting a plain text link and then use copy/paste to go to the other url

    Can't speak for anyone else but I post links all the time. Ironically, when the forums are experiencing problems like we've seen recently, I tend to post more links (e.g. links to free image hosters and links to pastebin).

    I actually cannot stand the forum behavior which auto-shortens link text when the link text is the same as the url and it's over some predefined length. (Yes, I know how to get around it)

    Couple of reasons:

    - it can obscure the target of the link, especially for links to technical material, where the full url is actually descriptiv

    - when the forums where migrated years ago, all link URLs were lost, only leaving link text behind, which was bad because those links had been shortened as well (in the case that the link text was originally the same as the URL), meaning that the original URL was lost forever

    Well, ideally only users with at least 10 posts could post links.

    Idk what the current situation is, but I think there used to be some limit on posting links for new users (and/or spam detection for links), but it was circumvented by the spammers who initially made a link-free post, but edited it to include links.

  • I don't want to ruin the party, but you still have 53 pages (and probably counting...) of spam waiting for you here: forums.garmin.com/.../showcase

  • I think another solution could be that any posts from new users have to go into a moderation queue. (I realize this may be unrealistic).

    I could be wrong, but didn't the forums kind of work this way at one point? At least if you made a post containing a certain kind of link, it seemed that sometimes you would be the only person able to see the post (for a certain period of time, presumably until a mod manually approved it). If you logged out, the post would not be visible.