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<blockquote data-quote="chriton227" data-source="post: 5880025" data-attributes="member: 33263">I'm all for reducing spam, but it is a very difficult problem to solve.&nbsp; While filtering to only ISP email accounts is an idea worth considering, it could easily become a nightmare to maintain.&nbsp; There are two possible approaches to restricting it to ISP only email:1) Blacklist non-ISP &quot;free&quot; email providers.&nbsp; This is probably the simplest to implement, but trivial to work around.&nbsp; It cost me less than $20 to get started with my site, which included a domain name, hosting, and more email addresses than I could ever want, and I'm sure there are much cheaper options available.&nbsp; You could always add more sites to the blacklist as you see spammers coming from those addresses, but that could be a time consuming job to keep up with.&nbsp; You would also have to keep an eye out for new free providers or alias services as they become available. 2) Whitelist ISP email providers.&nbsp;&nbsp; Just building a list of the existing providers globally would be a monumental task.&nbsp; You would have to accommodate obsolete ISPs (my main ISP email account is from a provider that was bought out over a decade ago, and my old account is grandfathered in).&nbsp; You will have cases where the ISP service doesn't provide enough email addresses for everyone in a family to have one and the family doesn't want to go with shared email accounts.&nbsp; Some ISPs don't even have the option of getting an email account (my 3g Mifi is internet access through a cell phone provider that doesn't offer email).&nbsp; I also know people that have business class internet connections for one reason or another and these frequently don't come with email addresses either.&nbsp; And finally you have people that don't have ISPs at all, they access the internet through other available access points like restaurant hot-spots, school, work, or libraries.Sites like StackExchange have a much stricter process that new accounts have to go through before they can really start posting, and it is driven by feedback from other users.&nbsp; Perhaps there is something similar that can be done here like adding a &quot;report spammer&quot; button that becomes available to registered users of a certain rep level, and if a poster accumulates a certain number of reports in a given time frame posts from the spammer account would be hidden and the account flagged for moderator review.&nbsp; There would need to be some audit trail/accountability built in to deal with abuse.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="chriton227, post: 5880025, member: 33263"] I'm all for reducing spam, but it is a very difficult problem to solve. While filtering to only ISP email accounts is an idea worth considering, it could easily become a nightmare to maintain. There are two possible approaches to restricting it to ISP only email: 1) Blacklist non-ISP "free" email providers. This is probably the simplest to implement, but trivial to work around. It cost me less than $20 to get started with my site, which included a domain name, hosting, and more email addresses than I could ever want, and I'm sure there are much cheaper options available. You could always add more sites to the blacklist as you see spammers coming from those addresses, but that could be a time consuming job to keep up with. You would also have to keep an eye out for new free providers or alias services as they become available. 2) Whitelist ISP email providers. Just building a list of the existing providers globally would be a monumental task. You would have to accommodate obsolete ISPs (my main ISP email account is from a provider that was bought out over a decade ago, and my old account is grandfathered in). You will have cases where the ISP service doesn't provide enough email addresses for everyone in a family to have one and the family doesn't want to go with shared email accounts. Some ISPs don't even have the option of getting an email account (my 3g Mifi is internet access through a cell phone provider that doesn't offer email). I also know people that have business class internet connections for one reason or another and these frequently don't come with email addresses either. And finally you have people that don't have ISPs at all, they access the internet through other available access points like restaurant hot-spots, school, work, or libraries. Sites like StackExchange have a much stricter process that new accounts have to go through before they can really start posting, and it is driven by feedback from other users. Perhaps there is something similar that can be done here like adding a "report spammer" button that becomes available to registered users of a certain rep level, and if a poster accumulates a certain number of reports in a given time frame posts from the spammer account would be hidden and the account flagged for moderator review. There would need to be some audit trail/accountability built in to deal with abuse. [/QUOTE]

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