They're idiots because a) we remove their posts as soon as we're able; b) this is a minor-friendly forum, so they're often exposing kids to unsuitable material; c) they give the countries they're posting from a seriously bad rep; and d) no-one wants to read their stuff. Almost all of this spam activity is done in the belief that it'll raise awareness of their silly websites on search engines and so on.
Right, so, what can you do?
- DON'T reply to spammers. It makes it much more difficult for the staff to spot and remove their posts
- DON'T click on any URL they post - whether it's seemingly innocuous ("Car insurance") or something that's obviously illicit. You don't know where these sites have been, and they're probably teeming with malware
- DO let us know if you see something dodgy. The best way to do that is to email the staff directly (particularly me and magic), making your message short and sweet. Something like:
Subject: Bad post on The Universal forum
Text: (URL of the problem thread)
I'm "fooli" and magic is "magicfinger", and of course we're both "at" theuniversal dot net.
You can also email the "abuse" at address - I think we both pick that one up too.
Anyone posting spam gets a hefty whack of the ban stick, their account deleted and the spam removed. If we see someone posting anything truly awful we'll do what we can to alert the authorities. It's tricky, though: most of it comes from countries where, to be honest, they probably don't give a fig. We could simply ban everyone from those places but that would be kinda unfair.
In the meantime, we do our best to be vigilant and we're making increasing use of automatic censorship to edit unsuitable words posted on the site (so common swear words or sexual references are changed to something more innocuous). The benefit of that is three-fold: it means that, as Eric Idle once sang, you can't say [bleep] on the radio; it means that the spammers often look even more stupid than they already are, and gives the staff a laugh; and, most importantly, it means a lot of the links they post don't work anyway.
We're still investigating and implementing techniques to prevent this stuff happening, and we'll post more here when there's more to say. I'm hoping we can implement a simple "report this post" function sometime soon, and (as discussed elsewhere on the board) there are other ideas about restricting access to people who've played the game, that are being discussed.
Thanks,
f
