There are lots of users who behave like spammers. They usually write nonsense (or not helping) posts, they bump threads that are months or years old. It is quite annoying when you are browsing threads and 90 % of content you see are posts repeating the same thing or just saying random bullshit. The amount of spam on this forum is so large that reporting such posts is just wasting time, because when you are finished with reporting one post, 5 more similar messages are added in the current thread. Mods, are you planning to do something about it? I would be really grateful. Thanks.
I suppose one problem is that the forum requires a specified number of posts before a person can post in the Buy/Sell forum (currently 25 posts), so people are encouraged to just post as fast as possible all over the place. That surely must contribute to all the crap that's on this site. I am trying to get to my 25 posts, but I'm trying to add helpful content wherever I am able. I have to admit though that I have also answered a couple of nonsense posts like, "Who is your favorite film star?" At least it was in the right forum, one designed for that sort of gibberish. Just my two cents.
One problem (and a bit larger, I think, than people spamming for BST) is the amount of people who are probably working together spamming for signature links. Maybe I am paranoid, but take this one as an example: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2464198 Also spammed on: http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense...al-link-terms-search-engine-optimization.html http://webhelpforums.com/index.php?topic=3103.0 http://siteownersforums.com/showthread.php?t=56772 http://www.virtualpromote.com/quest...-backlink-and-reciprocal-link-in-terms-of-seo Why 11. at the beginning? It's like it was taken from a numbered list and the number was left in by accident. The fact is there are many idiot posts like this and they aren't just spamming DP for forum signatures. The stupid thing is, these idiots don't realise that signature links are hidden unless you're a premium member.
Don't waste your time discussing the issue. It's been done before and no administrative action has been taken, all you get told is to report them. Removing the spam which stands to be 90% of the posts will crash the forum, it will be smaller than other IM forums. What you can do is ignore all the bullshit, benefit from whatever you can (e.g free listing marketplace) and do your studies elsewhere.
It's a forum... here for discussing topics, including these ones. If threads are reported that the mods miss, then they get removed. So, by doing something (rather than nothing) change can happen. If people keep voicing their views in Feedback, then there's a chance change can happen. It's better than doing nothing.
Yeah but that's just upon manual and system generated reports, e.g you do not implement methods to combat spam such as link-posting restrictions, extra verifications, extra scanning of users from countries than tend to spam, interactive moderators, manual approval of sales threads from new members etc.
What about trying adding a rating function in the discussion forums for every post (something like on Youtube)? When a post is rated really low or many times reported as spam, it could be hidden. If too large amount of posts is hidden, the user should lose the ability to post for some time. That might calm down spammers.
Actually there is a TON that is done on the back end already... You just don't notice it because it blocks stuff from happening/being posted to begin with... About 75 new users are flat out deleted each day because the system thinks they *might* be a spammer (before they are able to post anything). 100,000+ users have been banned. Around 300 posts/day are blocked automatically from the users that weren't blocked at the account level. The system automatically turns off people's ability to send PM if it thinks they are using PMs for spam. The system already treats user's from certain geographic regions with higher scrutiny. There *are* already link posting restrictions and extra verifications in place for new users. If you look around, you will find people crying that there posts bever show up or the system won't let them send PMs... It's not because of any bugs. As far as a rating system... The idea and basic function would be the easy part... The hard part is making it so it can't be abused/used incorrectly.
Alright Shawn, that's great, but explain how the amount of spam is inflated on here while on other IM forums people don't complain about such issue. Something still seems to be wrong. I ran a forums site once and it did not get spammed as this site is.
Some forums people are just sheep or too scared to complain (as they'll get banned). Others also have higher restrictions on posting. DP seems to have a good balance. @Shawn, I think you're right that it would be hard to prevent abuse of the system. All that you're doing now seems good. Although I might suggest that people can't make posts with images until they have a minimum of 25 posts (for example). I think you can guess what this would stop.
Well, in that case, please at least do not require adding a comment for each spam report. If people could mark a post as spam without leaving the page, I think that it would be used more often. I am not sure how your vBulletin handles all spam reports, on my forums there is always a new thread created in a hidden section that I created for this purpose. If your moderators would have something more flexible than this (for example a page with a table updated by AJAX with all posts reported as spam), it might be much easier to get rid of spam. _____ [TABLE="class: grid, width: 500"] [TR] [TD]Author:[/TD] [TD]Post:[/TD] [TD]Reported by X users:[/TD] [TD]Penultimate post*:[/TD] [TD]Action:[/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]seoindia[/TD] [TD]random comment[/TD] [TD]7 [/TD] [TD]214 days ago[/TD] [TD]delete post | give infraction | ban user | dismiss[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] *This might be useful to track users who are just bumping old threads Users who would regularly report spam might for example get extra reputation points in return for their help. _____ But I do not know if this idea is realisable. It is up to you.
The spam/pointless posts we have seen grows exponentially with the size of the site/forum. We got very little spam when we were small... but by the time we were the biggest, it's like putting a giant bullseye on your site. It's the same reason idiots target Windows more for malware/viruses vs. small operating systems like AmigaOS or BeOS. The same amount of spamming effort has the potential to be seen by many more people if they do it here vs. other places. If you actually saw how much spam we have to deal with (and do)... you would be pretty amazed. Even when you factor in all the custom stuff we have to block spam before it gets to us... For example... the Google forum current (as seen by a moderator/admin) where you can see deleted threads... Now imagine what the forum would look like if we really *did* do nothing (as you claim)... It's actually one of the things already on the big to-do list that I keep (not just for new users... but building a system to verify the integrity of ALL images [and possibly links] posted by anyone). Right now we are a little limited because we do rely on vBulletin's functionality (although we have extended it a bit to make it better). There is already a complete replacement for the vBulletin reporting system in the works... and not requiring a comment is already something the replacement system does.
Well ok, I believe you're doing the right thing and that the issue is to stay for a while, but perhaps more moderators would diminish the crap. One more thing is that people will keep on starting threads asking the same question as you've observed. Perhaps making an official statement or a post to be quoted would be great.
Yeah... I'd like to expand the Best Answer system I built so that the best answer for a question can exist in a different thread. The basic ideas are the easy part though... Figuring out to realistically implement the ideas is another thing though. If there was a setting I could turn on to automatically disallow spam, duplicate questions, stupid questions and just plain moronic/pointless posts, that would be enabled long ago... Unfortunately the solution isn't quite that easy. More moderators will happen, but I'm also more interested in building custom stuff that can solve as much of the problem programmatically rather than need humans. Needing xxx moderators per xxx users just does not scale well. On a massive scale, imagine if Google had people manually rating the quality of every web page they spider.
That's cool. I didn't know what it was with those images at first, until Smyrl let me know. At first I thought they were just idiots who didn't know how to use a forum properly, but now I know better and report all the ones I see.