This forum needs moderation

Too much spam going on. Does anyone else care, before I email a suggestion that will possibly not be seen?

Yea, I agree! Within the last week there has been quite a lot. It's very annoying.

Agreed. And definitely seems like it's all been within the last couple weeks...

On one hand, I absolutely agree that there has been way too much spam. On the hand, I'm not sure whether FS would put (or I suppose be able) to put in a moderator all the time. Given that it's a free site, and moderation would cost money. I do, however, wonder if it could be made easier to stop by implementing other solutions.

I did see a spam post a couple of weeks back and used the 'report abuse' button to send in a ticket...partially because it was spam, and more than that the link looked seriously dodgy (and no, I wasn't game to see if was a malware site myself ). They did actually respond really quite quickly, probably 12 hours or so...something like that. But I guess by the time that goes through, a lot of people have had time to see it. I do wonder if there could be a spam button that would send the post straight to moderation/review (similar to the ticket, but I guess without it being there for several hours). The only risk here being that similar to how the 'report abuse' button has seemed on occasion to be misused...i.e. someone didn't like a post someone wrote, so they reported it and the person's posts go to moderation while it's sorted. I could have the wrong person, but I do think I read a post along the lines that something like that happened to you Bglrn.

But yeah, it's really annoying.

Perhaps not absolute moderation so to speak but maybe "janitors" that police that stuff voluntarily. It could be a large group as long as the permissions are limited.


A written guideline as to what constitutes spam posting would keep those volunteering in the right direction.

In my experiences the buttons usually don't work the way they are meant to and a breathing person works better. Worst case spam get through for a while, but at least some of it will get handled.

Bglrn, what BlueNimah mentioned reports the page to a human who then decides whether it is spam or not.

It's very easy to deal with spam on this forum:

#1: DO NOT REPLY TO IT!
#2: Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the "report abuse" button.

I've done #2 dozens of times, and the spam always gets cleaned up within a few hours.

Many free sites have user moderators to handle things like that, so perhaps that's an option FS could consider? I'm sure there must be long-term members who would be happy to help out like that.

Yep, this exactly.
I've reported spam/member bots frequently and FS is great about getting it worked out in a timely manner.