How do you protect against spam?

Spam has been a major problem on many websites, including other nudist websites. Therefore, we have a few systems in place to help significantly reduce spam:

Account Registration

New members must answer an open-ended question about their interest or involvement in nudism. These responses are manually reviewed by site staff. And new members cannot log in until they are approved.

The open-ended nature of this question means an answer cannot simply be searched online; the member must put in at least a little effort to write a passable answer. Considering this is a nudist website, we find it unlikely a legitimate spammer will be able to mimic a nudist with a good nature in their response.

Identity and Age Verification

Members by default do not have permission to upload multimedia or attachments; they must go through an age / identity verification process to get this permission. The full details are outlined in our Terms and Conditions. This safeguard ensures those who upload media, especially if anyone is nude, are at least 18 years old, and are only uploading media of themselves (unless others gave them written consent). It also deters spammers from being able to immediately spam the site with inappropriate media. 

Content Submissions

We have some automatic safeguards in place to help us reduce the amount of spam on Midwest Nudists:

• On every submission of a form, we run a check of the member's IP address with the Stop Forum Spam and Project Honey Pot IP blacklists. If the IP is listed, then either their submissions will require approval, they won't be able to submit anything, or they will be IP-banned entirely, depending on the threat level.
• On every page, we have hidden scripts from Project Honey Pot that humans cannot see and would never normally follow. If it is followed, the visitor is almost certainly a spam bot and will get listed on Project Honey Pot's blacklist.
• On every form, we have hidden fields that humans don't see and would not fill out. If any of these fields are filled out (usually by a bot), then the submission is flagged as spam and action is taken.
• On every submission of a form, antispam heuristics are run on the submission to determine the likelihood the submitted content is spam. If the confidence level meets certain thresholds, action will be taken.

When the website software determines someone to potentially be a spammer, one of three actions will be taken automatically:

• The content will be hidden and flagged for moderator approval, if the antispam system thinks the submission might be spam but is not confident.
• The attempt to submit content will be outright blocked if the antispam system is confident that it is spam.
• The attempt will be blocked and the IP address will be banned automatically if the antispam system is so confident that it was a spam submission that no reasonable person would ever submit something like that.

Report System

And of course, we have the report system as a last resort; no antispam system is perfect. Everywhere are report links and buttons which allow you to submit violating content to the staff for review. Please help us keep Midwest Nudists spam-free, and you will be rewarded!