Seems a glitch in the forum as I can not make first post.

[anika200]

I had no links in the post so I make this post to hopefully get passed my first post. Maybe it was the code tags or content that cause the problem? I will be posting the exact same thread after this post into the new guy area.

An error has occurred anika200! You must have 1 posts in order to post links. Your current post count is 0.

[SteveRiley]

We take a variety of measures to reduce the utility of this forum to spammers. One of these measures is to require an initial post free of links. Why? Our experience shows that forum spammers use automated software to register accounts and then create a first post filled with spammy links. After this, they never return. Therefore, we reject, from any new user, an initial post that contains links. We've eliminated a not inconsiderable amount of spam this way. All it takes for a legitimate user is to create a new thread or reply to an existing one, as you've done here. It's a reasonable method for increasing our assurance that you're a real person.

[NickStone]

Wouldn't a better solution be in the way new members create an account? Something like the Captcha system that you find on other sites when creating member accounts. You know the ones that get the user to type a range of letters and numbers which are displayed in such a way that most automated systems cannot identify.

[claydoh]

Wouldn't a better solution be in the way new members create an account? Something like the Captcha system that you find on other sites when creating member accounts. You know the ones that get the user to type a range of letters and numbers which are displayed in such a way that most automated systems cannot identify.

One of the problems are one-off accounts that are created solely to get in and make the spam post (or posts) and go away. Believe it or not, these are not always created by bots, and the captcha system is known to be able to be bypassed or scammed. We know this from past experience, Many forums have a minimum post count is put in place before allowing things like images and links.


I am beginning to think there is a bug in the wysiwyg editor and the bit that detects what is a url.
I wonder how many people create a first post with a link, get the message about links, delete the link text from that post, but still can't post the original topic and have to create a new one somewhere else?

[anika200]

I do not mind the restrictions on first posts but it would be nice if the code tags could be excluded. This seems to be what was causing the problem in my case, I believe it was the "http://repo." inside the code tags. Since links inside code tags do not generate clickable links maybe there could be a way to exclude that from the blanket blocker but I doubt the software is that flexible.

[SteveRiley]

Text inside CODE tags is still interpreted by BBcodes. To instruct vBulletin to ignore these, you need to wrap the affected text inside NOPARSE tags, like this: [noparse]http://www.jrandomurl.tld[/noparse]