Is this the general spam forum?

[Inge Jones]

As title. Does the site have moderators?

[Trixi]

they have but dont look so regularly after it

[xander]

There are moderators, but not enough to cover the forum 24/7. Hit the report button, and the users will eventually be banned.

xander

[GC13]

I've reported stuff and it still been there days later. The moderators aren't even logging on once per day.

[RGeezy911]

There is currently a backlog of shit stuck on the mod logs, I am sure of it.

The current moderators don't care - They look after the DEFCON forums, and nothing else. The staff don't put enough effort and time into their own website, or they just don't care either.

I'm no longer a moderator on here, and for good reason. (I stopped moderating about a month ago)

EDIT: Your best bet is to holler at them on their Twitter, FB, or even on the bug tracker.

[GC13]

I hollered at them on Twitter last night: no response, no spam deletion, nothing.

Seriously, if they need someone to moderate I'll do it. Just anyone to kill the spam bots. Maybe, if we want to move into really advanced territory, they'll fork over a hundred bucks to buy forum software that isn't notoriously vulnerable to spammers.

[Inge Jones]

Well it doesn't look like so much spam that it couldn't be cleared out once a day in 10 minutes a day! I am sure if they recruited a handful of us and even if the only privileges we had were spam removal, it would look a heck of a lot better than it does now. I often judge a project on its forums - the level of support and interaction there is with the staff and developers - and you'd think they'd want it looking good here.

[xander]

Well it doesn't look like so much spam that it couldn't be cleared out once a day in 10 minutes a day! I am sure if they recruited a handful of us and even if the only privileges we had were spam removal, it would look a heck of a lot better than it does now. I often judge a project on its forums - the level of support and interaction there is with the staff and developers - and you'd think they'd want it looking good here.

I think that part of the problem is that spam removal only is kind of a useless privilege, as, without the ability to ban users, you can't really stop the spammers. So if you want your de-spammers to be able to do anything useful, you need to grant them the ability to ban users, and that requires a higher level of trust, no?

xander

[Inge Jones]

It doesn't help - you just get them back with new IDs or new IPs. I used to have email confirmation and questions on my forum, but really a few spam posts a day is not the end of the world as long as there is someone to tidy it up so the place doesn't *look* neglected and unwelcoming to human conversation. I don't think I'd want normal moderators to have banning privs on any forum - that sort of thing should always be referred back to an admin - I've seen too many unnecessary bans from a clash of personalities leading to a user being accused of insubordination by a moderator.

[GC13]

Well then maybe the admins should do what they can to harden the forum against spambot attack. These bots are allowed to make their first posts un-moderated despite including many links in them, and the boards use an old-style captcha that is easier for bots to answer than humans (the phpBB thread on spam prevention even specifically calls out GD CAPTCHA as worthless now).

Put in some better methods to stop the bots from registering, and actually moderate the forums.

[NBJeff]

It's been a full 5 days and the Spam-Bot user is still posting new threads under the same username?
If and when the moderator logs in he's going to get an explosion of messages reporting spam...

[xander]

It doesn't help - you just get them back with new IDs or new IPs.

They may, or they may not. The problem is that many of the spambots just post and post and post until they are banned. If a bot is posting 10 times a day (or a minute, as has happened before), deleting their posts doesn't solve the problem.

xander

[GC13]

That one spam bot has got up to fifty posts now, every one of them reported. I'm seething with rage (okay, simmering with disdain). I would never let this happen in any of the communities I've moderated. Apparently tweeting @IVSoftware every night isn't enough to get them to notice that their OWN BOARDS look ridiculous. A little bit of pride is all I'm asking—darn near the bare minimum. What is the point of having a General Discussion board if it's clogged with spam?

I mean, out of fifty posts displayed right now only twelve aren't spam threads. Three of them are stickied and so have to be there (meaning 9/47 aren't spam threads), and one is this thread complaining about spam threads. That gets us about 1/6 of the front page being about the forum itself, and the other 5/6 being spam ads. How classy.

[Inge Jones]

Actually, have these forums been abandoned altogether by staff and developers? They still seem actively involved in creating their products but is it possible they have kind of forgotten the forums leaving them simply as a user-to-user area? In which case it would make more sense to just make one of our own, with actual moderators.

[GC13]

Or you could just use the Steam forums. They're more active than these boards, and while people always say "you should post your suggestion on the official boards; the devs never check here" obviously they never check these boards either.