Topic: Policy on reporting spammy threats. (Read 319 times)

I would be reporting to trash the whole topic at times, when it has been discussed too much in the general boards or when there is absolutely zero meaning portrayed by the following posts which is neither useful for building up the OP nor does provide any insight to the reader or when the whole topic has been deviated too much from the OP. In the latter cases, it would be quite difficult for both the reporter and the moderator to report and trash various posts (>20) and at such times it would be good to sweep the whole topic along with the various replies which has been posted below.

On rare circumstances, whenever I report a legit thread stating them to be moved to particular boards the whole lot gets trashed all of a sudden. Hence this should have been a decision coming from the moderator's end who has handled my report and they must have felt the topic isn't necessary for the forum as a whole. But, the topic served it's purpose and was indeed good to be present in other board but were trashed removing all the replies along with the topic.

Let us consider the same scenario from the perspective of a local board which doesn't have a moderator, here there are various topics which were created years back and are still being bumped by newbie accounts with low value pointless referral spams. This has been a practice for over 2+ year and with over 500 replies it is literally difficult to trash particular posts. Hence in this scenario we have no other go other than trashing the whole thread instead of particular spam posts which has exceeded more than 300 in numbers.

If the content of the post was so low value, uninteresting, spammy, etc., that it would be immediately trashed without a second thought if it were a reply, then I see no reason it should be treated any differently just because it is an opening post. In the example here, such a thread should be trashed. I reported several of this user's other threads, and I'm glad to see that they were all trashed.

The only caveat to this is in my opinion is if a spammy opening post has generated some useful discussion or has answered some questions which arose, and it would be detrimental to trash those replies as well. In which case locking rather than trashing is more appropriate, but such examples of useful discussion being generated from a spammy topic are few and far between.

When a moderator lock or remove a thread/reply, the last thing he would think of is whether the user is going to be paid for that post or not.
It's up to the bounty/sig campaign managers to deal with such abuse.

Topics are usually locked when OP is relevant but there is no need for further discussion or when it becomes a "spamming mega thread". The whole thread gets trashed/removed when it's irrelevanr or is against forum rules.

The definition of participation as spam belongs to the mod/admin and how the user poses the question. Therefore, it is difficult to set guidelines to limit this, especially since some people deliberately violate BTT rules, either because they want their ads to appear or to increase their rank.
Mostly new users ask a question why the post was deleted and then they will get the answer with a link to the forum rules.

Many of these problems will be avoided when welcome message is released.

IMO, the entire thread should be thrashed if the original post does not pass the objective threshold quality level of the moderator of that thread, a strict policy in this may not be possible, but mods can be given guidelines on how to act. While, a thread should be locked if there are quality discussions in it, but it has already run it's the course.

As regards legitimate posters who may drop replies on these threads, a notification could be sent out, as it's done with deleted replies, notifying the user of the thrashed thread and by extension deleted post. Normally they should not have more than one or two replies on such threads a week as they are sometimes fairly easy to spot, and they'll be able to cover up if they are on a signature.

Also, probably a typo, but your topic reads 'threats', instead of what I think you meant to be thread.

Exactly for this reason i tend to use "trashcan" instead of locking the thread.
This takes away the joy of those unnecessary threads that don't generate any added value for anyone
But there are no real guidelines for this.
I'm only responsible for the german part of the site and fortunately these spamthreads are very limited there.

Focusing on the whole forum in general , what is the policy for removing(trashing) a thread instead of locking it?
 Are the mods taking in consideration the content of the discussion or just the OP?

Example :

A newbie created 8 threads like this above in a matter of a day. Many of them are trashed, now there are 2 more in the profile from the example.
Shall they be trashed as well.

Here are my thoughts: if a spammer post in those threads and they get locked, the spammer get their reward from the signature campaign. If the thread gets trashed, he looses all the time and effort to post and eventually will give up. Its

It is very easy to make a alt account, post some stupid questions and the spammer gets to answer, then more spammers come over, of course there are good legit people posting too, when kind of discussion is created but it's just an empty talk.
Then other spammer do the same to return the favor of the previous one, and basically there is no end to it.

Do we need to add some guidelines to reduce this from happening?