There are a number of ways used to reduce spam on the forums. First of all, there's the balance between making registration easy and making it tough - we err on the side of tough, as it ultimately provides a safer place for everyone. The registration process these days requires folks to enter in a code from an computer-generated image captcha, so that eliminates almost all automated spam attacks. The flip-side is that we likely lose out on forum participants. The spammers that do manage to register, have to do so with "eyeballs on the screen" to match the image captcha. That slows them down, so it makes it less profitable for them to do so - but still, some get by. Most of these spammers are from countries where labour is cheap, so that's why they have the time. Spammers that do get through are dealt with promptly - most regulars on here know to use the "Report this post" button, so that means any spam that does occur is dealt with within eight hours most of the time. It tends to be commercial spam, so most people are savvy enough to ignore it anyway. It also tends to happen overnight local time, so it is dealt with before most west-coasters are active on here. I also glance through an email notification of every posting on the board - I don't necessarily read for content, but I do check for keywords and URLs that either suggest a spammer or trouble. Needless to say, this takes up a lot of time at certain times of the year.
Spam could be dealt with more quickly if the board software had the capability of automatically quarantining a post based on the number of complaints received against it via the Report Post function. Such a post could be hidden from view until its fate is subsequently determined by a moderator. To avoid abuse of this capability only those complaints from 'trusted' board members would count towards triggering the quarantine. This group, operating on consensus, could then be considered as a low level moderator.
Well, I'd be ok with that - and in fact, I believe I could set something similar to that up. I wasn't sure if it was kosher to ask of the forum members to do such a thing, though, as they already give so much freely to so many people.
I don't see much more effort required collectively to do this since it sounds like members are already reporting spam postings. Let's see what others think of this.
I agree, I report when I can for the good of the forum as a whole. Also personally I hate spam!!! ; ) Ed
I am so out of it that I have not even noticed any "report this post" feature, but will gladly do my part to squash spam. I am confident that many readers would be glad to do the same - the problem if any would be too much, not too little, enthusiasm.
It's the exclamation mark in a little red triangle, right hand end of the green bar at the top of every post.
Rather than creating a new group of members for this purpose perhaps Contributors as defined in the thread Benefits of Registering and Posting | UBC Botanical Garden Forums could be used. This would remove the need for Daniel to recruit volunteers and to maintain a separate list for them. I'd like to clarify my suggestion by saying that only unique complaints will be counted. That is, multiple complaints against a post filed by the same member will only count as one in the quarantining process. This would lessen the potential for abuse.
Well, I had considered that as one mechanism re: contributors. The other is to activate the unused reputation system. This would add another layer of complexity, but it would also make the forums more self-regulating, and, I think, less work for me. As an example, instead of quarantining posts, it would provisionally quarantine users, so if a spammer came on and made 10 annoying posts, 2 people with high reputation could sink all of the spammer's posts - they wouldn't be deleted, but they'd be hidden to most people, I think, until I could deal with them.
Because of the excellent work of the staff these forums are relatively free of spam. Taking proactive steps to improve the system is good but this discussion should be tempered by the fact that there isn't an immediate problem to solve. The reputation system appears to be a viable solution but I wonder if it might introduce unforeseen problems.
Sign me up! Spam should be in a can only. I go out of my way to report it at other sites, many are much harder to report the problem, than this exceptionally fine one. I rarely spot much here. Thanks!!!
