Rate-limit new posts/threads and private messages
 

Some of you might remember my other hack, which I wrote to prevent people from creating excess amounts of threads in order to spam or troll people on my forum.

Unfortunately, once I stopped them from creating a lot of threads, they went to other lengths to annoy me, including someone writing a tool (vbspammer.exe) which would cycle through userid's and private message spam people.

Well, I've created this hack to address these issues.

This hack will allow you to:

• Limit the number of new threads created per hour by a user
• Limit the number of replies a user may post per hour
• Limit the number of private messages a user may send per day

I'll provide limited support, but since I developed this to suit my needs (and not to be some super flexible hack), I probably won't be extending the functionality of this hack anymore (unless someone comes up with a super idea).

Enjoy!

-Kyle

Nice idea :)

- miSt

I'd like to see these per user group, rather than per user. That way, if someone is a troll, we can just move him/her over to the troll usergroup.

Unfortunately, that's the sort of the modification that falls into the "not gonna happen" category, it's not really possible with the way i've written this hack.

# Limit the number of private messages a user may send per day

Are you considering creating a new version of your mod for 3.x? Or has anyone tested if it works? (Currently using 3.6 so apologize if already in 3.8).

I see a lot of others that do post rate limiting/flood control (some now built in and additional like 138445) but none that list they work for PM's.

Sadly I don't plan on maintaining this because we no longer use this hack. I thought I read something about similar functionality being included in vBulletin, maybe in the 4.0 discussion thread? We ended up going to a "5 posts before you can PM" deal. It doesn't stop the PM spammers, but it does tend to curb abuse a bit.

I'd still really like "Report this PM to a moderator" functionality, but I haven't found time to write anything.