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When I started riding mtb a couple of years ago I was sticking mainly to gravel fire roads and had just fought my way to the top of a rather big and steep hill. I stopped to catch my breath, have some water and admire the view and my effort when I saw this woman coming up the same hill, on a cargo bike kinda similar to the attached photo, with two kids dressed as pirates all shouting and jumping up and down in the cargo box. She had one hand on the handlebar and the other on a leash to a big german shepherd pulling straight to the left.

When she got to the top I say "Whoa, nice effort" to which she smiled and replied with a "Thank you" without even sounding a little bit out of breath.

http://sf.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12_03/chris/oldstyle_wooden_christiania_bike_2921.jpg

Forget about those Tour de France riders going up mount Tourmalet or whatever, let's see them ride with an unruly german shepherd on a leash and a bunch of exited kids jumping all over the place - that woman had them all beat for sure!

grammar pedants on the way no doubt

Grammer pendant's is going to has a feel day with mine post's, hehe..

There there now, I was merely saying that you don't have to post anything pointless, nor are you limited to post in the nursery. You can post across the forum from day one, only you can't start a new thread.

You're right, I could have gone trawling through the forum looking for subjects in which to add something of proper value, however, my main objective for registering was to respond to a for sale ad which adds a bit of a time issue.

Another issue with adding value right from the start is the level of knowledge already on this forum. You guys know a lot about bike related subjects so bringing something new and valuable to the table isn't all that easy, especially if it has to be stuff that haven't already been posted a trillion times before.

Then again, I could just have done what most people seems to do and made my first post a "Hello all", my second post a "Lol" and my third post a "3'rd post, woohoo!", but then we're back at pointless.

Being in a bit of a time crunch I chose to rant a little about my view on spam measures that targets real people. I'm glad to hear that your current system works, that makes the inconvenience slightly less annoying.

So cock off!

Just checked, my cock's still on, so you can both literally and figuratively blow me I guess...

So how would an intelligent spam filter look?

One idea could be to filter based on behavior. Spammers behave very differently compared to regular people. How about installing a quarantine system with unwritten thresholds?

Example, a threshold could be if you made more than 15 posts in 30 minutes. Or if you pm more than 20 people within an hour. Stuff that real people rarely never do, but spammers do very often. It would annoy very few real people but annoy spammers quite a lot.

If the thresholds are made public knowledge the spammers can adapt to beat the filters by posting slower or in smaller numbers, so thresholds has to be somethings only the admin knows the exact numbers on.

If a spammer hits the limits all his posts are quarantined. Once in a blue moon a regular, real person might also hit the limit, say you've just bought something new and exciting and feel the urge to broadcast a picture of your new saddle, boom, quarantined. Or maybe you type really fast and post more than 15 replies within 30 minutes and accidentally get quarantined.

Once a day or when convenient, the admin looks through the quarantine folder and kills all the spam. The regular user with a fast posting pattern gets "unquarantined" and also gets a special flag telling the spam filter not to bother him again in the future.

A filter like that would annoy only a few real people, those false positives, they will have their posts delayed a bit and then receive immunity from the filters in the future.

In short, I think a behavior based filter would work a lot better than forcing everyone to post a number of pointless posts.

My second post might well be my view on an anti-spam measure like this nursery.

If I were a spammer it wouldn't really be that hard to program a spam bot to register, wait 24 hours, quickly post 3 pointless posts, then spam the forum silly before those 3 pointless posts were reported and that would be that. Damage done, didn't change anything except forcing my bot to delay 24 hours.

Making a filter that annoys regular, decent people without blocking the spammers is a fail in my book.

3 posts to get out of nursery and the threat of being reported and banned if they are pointless - that makes it a bit tough on me, because my reason for registering in the first place is to make an offer in PM on a for sale post, which means that this post and the next two I make is pointless at least to me.