Forum spam

When you see a spam post in a forum, please don't reply to it and do not click on the link in it.

To report spam click on the little triangle at the bottom left of the post.

More info here..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_spam

It's not been quite so bad lately but I still can't understand why the admin don't put new members on moderated posting for the first few posts which would almost entirely eliminate the problem.

Vern said:

It's not been quite so bad lately but I still can't understand why the admin don't put new members on moderated posting for the first few posts which would almost entirely eliminate the problem.

Click to expand...

I totally agree with this.

That option has been discussed and dismissed - I personally think it would create more problems than it would solve. If you were a new and as yet unregistered user, or a prospective buyer, having to wait for your post to appear and then for an answer, perhaps several days (mods are unpaid and do it in their own time), then you could get discouraged.

Because we are a small niche market the forum does not get anywhere near the spam posts of other forums so they are not really a serious problem - and long may it stay that way.

EDIT: To give an example - the SPAM post which (probably) started this thread is still there 5hrs later waiting to be removed. I did post a spam report to the Mods within minutes of it appearing but different date/time zones, a life outside of monitoring these forums, etc means that the mods cannot always respond instantly. If I was a new or prospective user waiting for an answer to an important question and my question has not even appeared after 5 hours then I would probably go elsewhere.

Other consumer forums apply this policy and I'm sure it doesn't affect their sales. Outside the impatient 10 year olds, I'm sure most prospective members would entirely appreciate the reasons behind it.

Conversely, if I was a potential new customer for Trainz and found their forum riddled with spam posts, doesn't exactly paint a good picture of their skills and abilities.

I've reported quite a lot over the last couple of years, seems to be a lot less of a problem lately though. I just report and move on, there are far worse problems elsewhere.
As we only seem to have one obviously active moderator, that could cause a long delay to some posts getting approved while he's at work or asleep. On one forum I joined, it took 3 weeks to get a post approved by which time is was irrelevant as an answer to a question. So not exactly a fan of that method, you would need 24/7 mod cover for it to work properly with any form of efficiency.

Personally I think Read Only access for people without a registered version or maybe write access to just one forum for potential new user questions.

euromodeller said:

When you see a spam post in a forum, please don't reply to it and do not click on the link in it.

To report spam click on the little triangle at the bottom left of the post.

More info here..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_spam

Click to expand...

Couldn't be more well put. Follow this exactly, and do not post a reply to the SPAM, nor click on the links, nor read it

This forum is running vBulletin 4.2.2 which hit the end of life date nearly 2 years ago. So updating to a new version might be the best step. The company offers help with the upgrade for $149 US plus the cost of the new version. It looks like security patches are still being put out but vBulletin 5 has lots more features for dealing with the issue of spam and user management.

William

Here are the new features for user management.
https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/vboptions_group_register

Haven't we figured out that N3V has no intentions of upgrading this forum's architechture? This matter's reared itself tens of times and the higher-ups still refuse to change anything for whatever reason.

However, i agree that moderating the first 10 posts or so of any given account is the best way to accomplish such a task. Regardless of whether it deters new recruits (which it won't; many other forums have this feature and it works), in my view it's necessary for keeping spam accounts off the grid. This would require the attention of the current moderation staff however, and that depends on their ability to check the forum every so often.