What about smarter Moderators?

I understand that not everyone in the sciences understands how spam advertising works, but it should not be too hard to train. I know one daft moderator who thinks repeating a link is spam even.

wheersmanna is the banned name of a member who recently uploaded spam to Sciforums.

http://www.sciforums.com/search.php?searchid=690709

17 posts designed to get lost in Sciforums history and forever be hosted by search Engines within Sciforums.

A moderator has banned that username, but has left all 17 posts intact.

If I was placing secret advertisements for my services, would a ban on my name deter me if I placed 17 successful advertisements on my last attempt. Wheersmanna2 could easily resurface in a day using the name "bigspammer" and all we would do is ban them after their work is done.

In 20 years someone searching for "blackfriday-deals" may come across a sciforums post posted by banned member wheersmanna 2- years earlier.

In other words
SCIFORUMS NOW IS HOSTING THESE 17 SPAM POSTINGS FOREVER.

unless Moderators are trained to have a clue about dealing with Spammers, and how Spam works.

I understand some like Stryder are aware of issues, but I too often see Spam left here and it only encourages more. Sciforums should have a policy to delete Spam and announce this harshly to any new members (with this intent).

"Sciforums POLICY is to remove ALL SPAM POSTS" sort of lecture upon joining.

Then we only need smarter moderation.

 

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Heh... allow me to shed some light on this:

I just banned two spammers today, without deleting a single post.

Why?

Because I don't have the authority to delete the posts in the sub-forums they are in.

Moderators are mods of certain sub forums. We simply don't have the access to go thru and remove posts in every single sub forum. Admins and super-mods can do that, and so when we ban a spammer (much like I did today) we make a post in the moderators forum requesting the respective sub-forum moderators or a super-mod or admin remove the offending threads

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Okay,

That does seem to shed light on why this is a common practice here.

So you are saying that moderators are not trusted enough here for permissions. I suppose I can see that.

Yes. I can see now why problem exists.. Thanks. (I wouldn't trust half of them either)

 

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It's more a distribution of power kind of thing, which makes sense. It also allows moderators to focus more on their core sub-forums - for example, my reign is over the sci-fi and fantasy sub-forum... I can moderate a few other of the general sub-forums as well.

 

Spam is a drop in the bucket compared with the amount of garbage being passed as "science" by a large segment of the forum members. This makes the "Sci" in the "Sciforums" an oxymoron. Other forums push such crank stuff into "Trash" or "Cesspool" very promptly. Not Sciforums.

 

There shouldn't be any problems now, as a systems been put in place to attempt to deal with some of the amount of spam the forum has been hit by (the spam itself is generalised in the sense that it isn't just targetting sciforums alone, it's actually part of a bulk spammer that's been hitting a number of websites)

currently that means some posts will be moderated, so if your post doesn't show up straight away, it's possible you might be in the moderation queue. (It seems if a member shares too many IP's with spammer IP's or banned members it can cause this)