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Not Quite On Topic: Reporting Spammers w/o Opening Spam Threads?

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jwhouk:
Didn't know where to put this, so figured putting it here would get notice of our mods:

Is there a way we can report obvious spammers without opening their threads, and by so doing accidentally giving them hits (like with the pharmacy thread)?

Odin:

--- Quote from: jwhouk on 21 Jan 2011, 06:58 ---Didn't know where to put this, so figured putting it here would get notice of our mods:

Is there a way we can report obvious spammers without opening their threads, and by so doing accidentally giving them hits (like with the pharmacy thread)?

--- End quote ---

No, all you can do is click that nifty little "Report this post to a moderator" link on the bottom right of each post.

akronnick:
I suppose we could wait till the Moderators see for themselves, but where's the satisfaction in that?

I wouldn't click on any of their links, however. No way, no how, no sir!

pwhodges:
We do, of course, notice when we next check in (and I check several times a day, unless I am away from home).  Most moderators don't bother with this part of the forum, but reporting a post gets a mail sent to all  mods, so may get it dealt with faster (it's a mail, not a PM, so we can get to see it without having to connect to the forum site).

The procedure is then that the thread gets moved to a hidden Trashbin forum, so that an admin (i.e. Ben/"est") can pick it up and do the necessary banning of the poster, and their IP address.  Ben is also actively developing the spam defences, so he may analyse the post as well before finally deleting it.  If the spam post was added to another thread, we can split it off as a separate thread, and then move that to trash.

In the two months I've been doing this, the number of spams I've dealt with each day (over the whole forum) has dropped from an average of about six to less than one, so I reckon Ben is doing reasonably well at improving the defences at present.

bicostp:

--- Quote from: pwhodges on 21 Jan 2011, 08:31 ---The procedure is then that the thread gets moved to a hidden Trashbin forum, so that an admin (i.e. Ben/"est") can pick it up and do the necessary banning of the poster, and their IP address.

--- End quote ---

I've found it much easier to just delete the spambot accounts, taking the posts with them.

Individually banning spambot accounts just clutters the ban list up (they never log back into old accounts), and banning their IP addresses is ineffective unless you ban the whole of China.

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