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

[Dean C]

Nice idea

- miSt

[jamoss]

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.

[mute]

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.

[mmorse]

# 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.

[mute]

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.