Staff Activity & Spam Prevention

[Nullified]

I just registered here and am thinking of never returning. Where is the staff and why are they not doing anything to prevent all the spam. I see more spam in the new posts search than I do regular member content.

[Czar]

Hi Nullified,

Thanks for joining and I genuinely appreciate this feedback. These days, I'm the only active moderator at GV and since managing the forum is not my full-time role, keeping up with ever-more-aggressive spam bots is tricky at times.

I'm doing the best that I can with the limited resources available, and have removed all of the threads you reported, but I do rely on members to report posts (as you did) in order to efficiently manage the moderation process.

Thanks again. you choose to move on, I'll understand. Otherwise, if you do notice any spam, reporting this will see it purged and the offending member deleted within hours.

Kind regards,

[Nullified]

Do I need to report all posts from a spam bot or just one and you'll purge all the bot's posts?

[Czar]

Hi again,

Just one will be fine. I've purged the two most recent that you identified. Hopefully more members will also take to actively using the "report" icon, in order to keep the forum as clean as possible.

Thanks for your help,

[Nullified]

I have a few suggestions:

Try an alternate or even secondly spam verification method (possibly even custom)

Ask dedicated forum activists if they would consider being a super moderator on the forums to help combat bots. I recommend super mods so they can moderate all forums because the bots tend to place the same post in several different forums.

Develop a intro usergroup for new users and require those posts to be moderated. Check the user's posts for human like activity and if you deem them bots delete them, if human you can manually place them in the registered members usergroup.

Try making the report button bigger in some way. you'll need to edit the postbit template to do so.

[Nullified]

I'll keep an eye out on bots for you and when I report them i'll specify spambot and link to their posts.

I have extensive experience running a vbulletin 3.x commuity and editing the templating systems. I even developed a few mods for the forum in the past. If you have any questions of how to do something I will guide you best I can.

[Nullified]

BTW, I recommend changing the timeout on report post to a lower number. With the number of spam bots on this site I think your greatest concern should be reporting them and frankly, when I do a new posts search and fine 50% of the posts from bots I am not going to wait 60 seconds in between each report. Instead I am simply just going to skip over it.