Let me draw a line first > I want to focus here on the forum community /the active,human part of it/ as the instrument to deal with the problem, there are so many members wishing to help and volunteering already, I have enough proof that we have a great task force here ready to react /thanks to all the participants in the SpamBusters sharing from their own time to report/.
The main two sources of SPAM /in the English section at least/ as I see them are >
- Signature Bounties
- Ann-bumping-account-farming bots
The key to control the spam from the Bounties is to focus on the Managers. We have discuss this matter many times before, but let us find a solution here once for all.
What is missing? Clear rules for the bounty managers, clear punishments for those who do not follow the rules.
I'll post this great idea from hilariousetc. If we can develop it more it would be one possible way to control them.
As I said earlier I want to focus on ideas where theymos is not so much involved in the development and he can focus on other more importation things, but the working force will be the forum society.
I was thinking about the possibility of some sort of default trust team should be assembled to help police shit campaign managers seeing as theymos doesn't really want to do anything about them even though they're the ones responsible for 99% of the spam here. If a problem campaign is spotted then they should be given a warning that they need to do something about the spam. If any campaign has say five or ten users baring their signature that are either making very low quality posts or are banned for copy and pasting then they should get the warning and then negative feedback from everyone on the team until they clean their campaign up. Negative feedback works a lot of the time because they don't want their reputation tarnished when they're trying to make as much money as possible and if they ignore the warning first then feedback should be used as a last resort. Campaigns really shouldn't be allowed to come here and ruin the forum making it unreadable by paying unlimited users to make any old crap they can be bothered doing. When these campaigns accept Junior or even Newbies they are at worse overrun with copy and paste bots or at best one/two line spammers, but that doesn't matter to the campaign because as long as they're making the posts and are being paid in monopoly money they've created out of thin air it then their objective is still met. The longer we let people get away with doing a shoddy job without repercussions then it is only going to get worse.
The bots are the next big thing generating SPAM, and we, the SpamBusters were working mostly on the ANN threads, manually reviewing all the user activities. We had some success in locking some ANN threads and big part of the reported account were banned so I think we made a small impact, yet not enough.
Even more people will start reporting after the report badges come to life /which will be quite soon, probably in the next few years/ and then the mods work load will increase. However the bot activity will not be reduced enough as everything is automated there. So let's fight back, they can make bots to spam, we can make bots to check for plagiarism, text-spinners, one-word-shitposter. I'm sure we can do that, it's just to address to the right people.