Originally Posted by SSE 4 2SS
First off, there are a number of us that look at the boards multiple times weekly… A “glance” won’t find all of the spam/bots… They are, in many cases, AI generated… and hit this and many other sites 24/7. I’m not a bot, I need sleep, and I spend time away from here pursuing other interests as well… my family first and foremost…
I feel your pain, and I apologize… I was a member like you before being selected to be a mod… and I have never once regretted taking the position… However, I read at a really rapid rate, and I can’t see all of the posts on all of the various sub-forums in ten minutes, much less ten seconds… I can’t view threads any faster than you do.
I will say though that once a Spammer/Bot member is reported, I can look at that “members” postings very quickly. I can look at it in their user page, “Posts or Threads started…” then I can batch select everything they have up and kill it all with a few clicks of the mouse, or taps of the iPad screen…
Neither I nor any moderator I know on any forum goes and looks at every sub-forum, or thread title looking for spammers. It would be horribly time consuming and frankly boring as hell. We are after all, on this board, volunteers and we have myriad interests. I could not care less about shiny new car show stuff, and some guys only care about that. You have specific interests that you peruse regularly as well I would guess. If you don’t report that which you see, you will see it again and again until we stumble across it or someone else reports it…
It can take from 30 seconds (with a bot with one post) to several minutes each to get a report, (via email), wait for report to load, go and review it, determine if it’s spam or just a link inserted by someone not really knowing what they’re doing… or go into their history and see what else they have posted, or threads they have started… Decide on a course of action… (Not all funny looking links are spam per se…) then if I just logged on, as I make selections about what to do, I have to re-enter my user password to verify who I am, again… and then write out a note or word about why they are banned… then click to ban them… At this point, I tend to look and ensure they are banned and the postings are gone, at least to you folks.. We still see many of them… we see them as deleted but they are still background visual “noise.” All of this equates to a lot of pages loading and time spent reading… stuff I don’t care a whit about, but I will deal with it for the sake of the forum…
All of us, save one or two Admins/Mods, are Camaro owners or enthusiasts first… With 200,000 members spread across three boards, it would be a full time job for many people just running through all of the forums, sub-forums, threads and posts looking for spam, spammers and or bots. I know it’s frustrating… but if members don’t help with reporting, how can we possibly keep up, against computer generated bots… It’s old software, and it’s limited… however what would be lost if we had to completely upgrade… Don’t hunt them, just report them if you happen to see them while browsing your areas of interest, and if an additional thread or post you see is by the same member, (thread titles often look identical and are easy to recognize) there is no need to report that member again… we will find them in their user profile of postings. Well most of the time we do… I make mistakes too…
I don’t like the advertisements any more than the next guy, and it makes running spam bots off even more time consuming… but it’s the way of the world today…
So please, I ask, if you see them in your browsing, take a moment to report them, click on the triangle to report, type spam, and leave the rest to us… that won’t take a “full minute,” unless the internet is really slow. Nothing else is needed…There is no need to chase their postings and report each one you find by the same “member.” We can do that part quickly-ish… and it saves us digging through dozens of emails to see if it’s just the same reported spammer multiple times.
I hope this helps… The reports help us all, members and moderators, and we really do appreciate them…
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