please have a look at this thread --
http://www.dbforums.com/oracle/16489...lp-please.html

Done
Rudy - do us a favour. Either come back to moderating and sort these things out yourself or just report the things straight without the digs. One of the reasons you left was because of the amount of time that dealing with SPAM takes.

pootle flump ur codings are working excelent.

sorry, yes, i will

which is why i am so disappointed when i ~do~ report spam (saving you moderators the trouble of finding it yourselves) and it goes unactioned

i tried not making any "digs" pootsie, but i have now reported the same spam post every single day for a week and it's still sitting there

this leads me to conclude that one of the following must pertain --

- you disagree that it is spam (in which case why ignore my repeated reports? why not PM me to inform me that you're happy to let the spam remain so i don't continue to report it?)

- you aren't seeing my reports (which would be very disappointing)

- you don't care (which would be even worse)

which is it?

The middle one Rudy that is twixt t'others. I am sorry you are disappointed

pootle flump ur codings are working excelent.

Why not just have an automatic check that deletes any posts by users if the user has posted less than 10 times and either :

• someone with over 100 posts says their post is spam
• it contains an external link
• it's in reply to a post older than 1 year
• or if two or more people say it's spam

This would get rid of most of the spam and it would take no effort on the part of the moderators. The constants above would probably need to be parametrised. If there was a way to disable a post without deleting it then the above criteria could be made more severe.

my recollection from when i was a moderator is that all reports go to a special mods-only forum

is this not working, or are the moderators just not checking that forum?

I think your recollection is wrong Rudy.
TMK the alerts are sent (by email) to the moderators allocated to that forum. Since you left we rejigged things and divvied out the forums amongst the moderators.

Mike - some time ago there was talk of an upgrade to the latest vBulletin. This includes much more sophisticated rules which include some of the things you suggest. The last time I enquired this upgrade was still some time away, with no set date.

pootle flump ur codings are working excelent.

yes, perhaps i remember it from a different vbulletin site, as i was a moderator on several

i think the email is the default vbulletin behaviour, and posting the reports to a special mods-only forum is a vbulletin option -- according to a search i just did, you can set it in the vBulletin Options (in the AdminCP) under "User Infractions & Post Reporting Options"

you might pass the word along to inet to consider this option, as this will ensure that all moderators, not just those assigned to the forum, will see the reports when they do a getnew or getdaily


obviously some forums are not getting the moderator attention they deserve

regardless of the reasons for this (too few moderators, lazy or uncommitted moderators, whatever), it reflects terribly on the site when reported posts just sit there unactioned

this isn't meant as a dig, but if you are under-staffed with moderators, the spam situation is only going to get worse

i notice also that the sig spammers have started to arrive in noticeable numbers -- sig spammers, in my experience, are an even worse threat to forum viability than good old ordinary spammers for stuff like viagra and so on

I've tried to reply to this thread several times today, with no success.

VBulletin 3.8.4 doesn't appear to have the option for directing post reports. I get nearly 500 emails per hour at the email address used to report bad posts, most of which are spam (not spam reports, actual spam). Every few days I try to look at a few thousand messages to see if I can find anything useful, but at over 10,000 emails per day it would be a full time job just to scan them.

When iNet does the VBulletin upgrade, things are supposed to get better.

-PatP

I don't know that it will necessarily get worse, but another committed Mod would certainly help

There's not a great deal we can do. Our problem is that we have a real shortage of volunteers from under represented time zones and under represented technologies. You know most of us are US or Brit and MS focussed. We could try a pay raise to get Mods to work harder, but the last one didn't work so I don't see why another one would help.

I do have high hopes of the new software.

pootle flump ur codings are working excelent.

Do you not get access to the vBulletin database then? If you do then it would be quite a straight forward bit of SQL to get rid of most of the spam. Perhaps I should talk to vBulletin and charge them for a simple web page. I'm based in the UK so I'm probably not much help but, if you relax your high moderating standards, I could help in the Sybase, Unix, Database and system design, MySQL and PHP forums.

well, i'm certainly not up on the various releases, but my google search led me here which seems to suggest it's a stock option

while we're on the topic of reporting posts, i reported one in the SQL Server forum last night, and again a few minutes ago

SQL update double datatype

sig spammer

Fixed your sig-spammer.

-PatP