Ironic retention of spam posts
Posted: Tuesday, 28th October 2014, 02:47Hey everyone, this came up in a CYC thread and I think it is worth discussing seriously in the appropriate forum. This is from this thread in CYC: https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=14011, which obviously began as a spambot post. The spambot has been banned but I retained the thread upon a poster's request.
duvessa brings up some good points, and I'll start this off by saying that I don't retain most spam threads, usually, but some people on Tavern do enjoy posting silly stuff in them and I'm (obviously) not above having some fun with them on occasion, too.
Me or some other mod will delete *most* spam threads. There were three or four this morning (they usually come in short spurts like that) and I deleted all of them except for one, because someone had posted that they wanted to goof around in the spam thread a bit, so I moved it to CYC and just deleted the link (no free advertising even "ironically") and banned the username and IP address for gavinrochford.
But, if posters think that retaining even just the text of any spam post is bad policy, that's worth discussing. Aside from what duvessa brings up, there's (maybe?) some very small possibility that being less than 100% aggressive in deleting spam posts will make Tavern a more appealing target. (I don't know if that's the case; not trying to be alarmist, I just do not know one way or the other about what algorithms and criteria go into spam targeting.)
At any rate, cheesy or over-serious though this may sound, we mods do just try to act as enforcers of the Tavern community's standards when it comes to moderating, rather than imposing our own. If me or any other mod becomes convinced that a "100% delete with prejudice" policy is better for Tavern, then we'll switch to doing that.
Thoughts?
duvessa wrote:Okay, maybe this is just me, but I really don't like the Tavern policy of leaving spam threads and just editing out the links, and don't think it's a healthy policy for an Internet forum.
1. It makes the forum's moderation team look less active than it actually is. If you see a thread called "Cellphone Signal Jammer" sticking around for days on a forum, it's a pretty obvious conclusion to make that the moderators are either inactive or don't give a shit. Do you specifically want users to have a worse perception of your forum than they should? Yes, if they click on the topic and read it they'll find out that it actually was "dealt with", but why would they bother when it's clearly a spam topic? What could possibly be a less interesting topic to click on?
2. Let's say, against all odds, that users actually are discussing something worthwhile in the spam topic. In this case, it's hard to find, because it's in a topic with a useless spam title. Wouldn't you be better off providing one "Post Random Drivel" topic instead of having a new non-descriptively-titled topic every time a spambot shows up and someone replies with a joke before a moderator gets to it?
3. I'm willing to bet that editing out the links has absolutely no effect for forum users. Users already know not to follow those links, this isn't your grandparents' email inbox. All it does is indicate to me that you were willing to put in the effort required to delete the post or move it to the trash and get rid of the clutter on the subforum page and "show unread posts", but decided not to actually do it because you think it's funny or something.
duvessa brings up some good points, and I'll start this off by saying that I don't retain most spam threads, usually, but some people on Tavern do enjoy posting silly stuff in them and I'm (obviously) not above having some fun with them on occasion, too.
Me or some other mod will delete *most* spam threads. There were three or four this morning (they usually come in short spurts like that) and I deleted all of them except for one, because someone had posted that they wanted to goof around in the spam thread a bit, so I moved it to CYC and just deleted the link (no free advertising even "ironically") and banned the username and IP address for gavinrochford.
But, if posters think that retaining even just the text of any spam post is bad policy, that's worth discussing. Aside from what duvessa brings up, there's (maybe?) some very small possibility that being less than 100% aggressive in deleting spam posts will make Tavern a more appealing target. (I don't know if that's the case; not trying to be alarmist, I just do not know one way or the other about what algorithms and criteria go into spam targeting.)
At any rate, cheesy or over-serious though this may sound, we mods do just try to act as enforcers of the Tavern community's standards when it comes to moderating, rather than imposing our own. If me or any other mod becomes convinced that a "100% delete with prejudice" policy is better for Tavern, then we'll switch to doing that.
Thoughts?