B
Brinx
Guest
I'm posting this on General although it applies mostly to only a few boards so don't get too panicky on a whole 
Original thread.
We've always accepted and not really had a problem with a degree of 'spamming' and posting without a great degree of content (so to speak ) but over the past month it's gotten out of control. This is mostly a problem limited to a few of the boards within this forum but obviously as people typically read/post to other parts as well it's spilt out more generally.
The biggest embodiment is the '+1' style of trend that’s happened more recently. At the beginning . I personally am spending probably half an hour per day just trying to get rid of +1, IBTL, pointless out of context emotes and so on. Combine that with all the work the other three mods are doing on a daily basis and it's a pretty obscene problem.
So getting to the point; for the purposes of avoiding long threads debating what spam includes:
It’s tempting to add deliberately non-English posts into there but we won’t as that’s a separate issue.
The major point is that it's only people doing this persistently that are the problem and who'll be affected. There's no problem with 'casual' spammers and you're not going to be affected if you spam now and then. Hopefully very few people will come under this new policy and it’ll be a deterrent more than anything.
The procedure will be if you're ‘spamming’ in the above reasons:
Original thread.
We've always accepted and not really had a problem with a degree of 'spamming' and posting without a great degree of content (so to speak
) but over the past month it's gotten out of control. This is mostly a problem limited to a few of the boards within this forum but obviously as people typically read/post to other parts as well it's spilt out more generally.The biggest embodiment is the '+1' style of trend that’s happened more recently. At the beginning . I personally am spending probably half an hour per day just trying to get rid of +1, IBTL, pointless out of context emotes and so on. Combine that with all the work the other three mods are doing on a daily basis and it's a pretty obscene problem.
So getting to the point; for the purposes of avoiding long threads debating what spam includes:
- Posts/threads created purely to raise post count (excluding some threads with actual content like building up stories line by line etc)
- Bumping multiple posts at once for no real reason (i.e, trying to get a username across all the threads on the index)
- Any other persistent posting that just has a negative affect on the forum. Though this would be a case by case basis more so than a blanket rule like the previous two (thus very similar to what we’ve done for the past couple of years).
It’s tempting to add deliberately non-English posts into there but we won’t as that’s a separate issue.
The major point is that it's only people doing this persistently that are the problem and who'll be affected. There's no problem with 'casual' spammers
and you're not going to be affected if you spam now and then. Hopefully very few people will come under this new policy and it’ll be a deterrent more than anything.The procedure will be if you're ‘spamming’ in the above reasons:
- Firstly one of the mods (me, Damini, Tilda, Cadire) will PM a warning.
- If it persists and posting carries on in the same manner after that the postcount will be reset.
- If after that it still continues the account will be banned (and of course any alternate accounts created to get around the ban after).
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Before any screams of nazi modding and so on start we're doing this because it's gotten to a point where people are simply ignore things being deleted and posting similar stuff straight after again; a very small number of users from the total that visit here every day are essentially making it difficult for people who want to have decent discussions to do so; and although it's of smaller influence to the previous reasons - having pages of posts with no content doesn't exactly reflect well on the parent company or the community as a whole.
This isn't something we wanted to do - for me personally I'm not keen on putting in rigid policies as we’ve never had to in the past, but simply taking it in a more casual basis and dealing with the problem day by day seems to have been ignored.
Cheers,
