Help Us Fight Spam

[MomOfMany]

Personally, I would prefer a PM on a offensive post that needs immediate attention. But, that's just me. "Report to Moderator" sends all staff an email and to be honest, I rarely look at emails only because I get so few.

That is good to know because you are usually the one who is one when I see it and I know you will see it eventually but my thoughts are that you may be busy with threads in the challenge section you know answering questions and such and if I send the PM then you will see it right away rather then when you hop over to the general area. And the ones I have seen where pretty bad so I thought the sooner the better with kids on here. I am just glad that the way that I have been taking care of them is ok I don't want to be a bother.

[Esther1981]

I know I'm on here almost all day, so it's not a matter of me not being on, but I have yet to see a post I thought was offensive, so I guess that say's what an awesome job Pam, Metro and the rest of the staff are doing!

[Swede1992]

I think that it bypasses the whole idea with reporting if you just contact Pam and Metro, but you can't send a PM to all moderators as well. The best way would be to either just click 'report to moderator' or do that and send a PM to whoever you see is online. It's easy to see who's online on the forum main page and then we're guaranteed that it can be taken care of quickly, should Pam or Metro not be around.

[Pam]

I didn't really mean for this to turn into a debate about "Report to Moderator" vs. "Send a PM."  The programmed function for the Forum is the Report to Moderator button.  It goes to all Moderators and that's really the universally best way for it to be handled.  Metro, with all due respect, I realize that you may not regularly check your email, but we can't ask the members as a whole to make an exception in how they report spam because you don't check email.  It's fine if a member chooses to send a PM to whoever happens to be online, but we can't ask everyone to try to remember how they should report spam in different situations.  Nor can we expect the members to remember our schedules for when we're online.  It's our responsibility as the Administrators and Moderators to make sure we have everything covered on our side of things. 

So, to the members:  do what you're most comfortable with and we are very grateful for your help. 

[Leto85]

Sounds good to me.
For who want to know it: mostly is spam recognisable because the sender of it post a post that has nothing to do with the subject of the topic but says we should click on the link he linked and that's it.
That way I've found a spammer once and the link has sent me to an architectual website (which name I shall not name because that would probably make a spammer of me too). Nothing inappropiate for children though, but we are not waiting here for commercial advertisements we haven't asked for, now are we?

[Saltypaws]

Very rarely do I not see Pam or Metro on here, but the one time there was spammer, no other moderator was online, now that was weird, but they got taken care of anyway.  I am not on as much as I use to be, but for the most part, I always check my email and then come to the forum.  I think we have been very lucky on this forum.

[Swede1992]

Personally, it feels like I'm living out of air-pockets in my school-books, but I always keep this site at the back of my head. If I for some reason is just lurking without logging in or am checking my e-mail and I notice a recent un-removed spam I will immediately take it away, so I don't think it's a waste of time to use the report to moderator button.

[Leto85]

Very rarely do I not see Pam or Metro on here,

People like Pam are the reason for me to stick around here, even if I would have not liked The Sims at all. :$

[Pam]

I just want to thank everyone who has been so helpful with our ongoing war against spam.  We have several members who regularly report spam posts so that the Moderators can quickly act to remove it and ban the poster.  Spam will always be a problem and it will get worse as we continue to grow.  Our Moderator team watches for it as much as we can, but having such great members to help out makes a huge difference.  Thanks so much! 

[Esther1981]

Ok, that "person" really made me mad. Simstar is 12 years old and it posted THAT on her thread. I am literally shaking. I'm gonna go calm down, I definitely did my reporting duty today. Stupid people make me sick. I hope I got to it before Simstar or any other kids saw that.

[Twinmum]

Yikes.. was that 20 odd posts by the same person just then. So glad they are gone. Do you guys have a function to delete all the posts by someone in one hit or do you have to remove them all individually?

Norma

[Pam]

Yikes.. was that 20 odd posts by the same person just then. So glad they are gone. Do you guys have a function to delete all the posts by someone in one hit or do you have to remove them all individually?

Norma

Moderators have a function that will ban, delete, and remove all topics and posts...  all with just a couple of clicks.  I didn't see the spam attack today, but a big thank you to everyone who reported it.

[Micler]

You guys are awesome. Within minutes that spam was completely cleaned up!

[Juxtaposition]

Yeah that was really terrible, what kind of pathetic loser would do that on a site that has members as young as 12, so lame of them, so awesome of our moderators to fix it so quickly

[Leto85]

Yeah that was really terrible, what kind of pathetic loser would do that on a site that has members as young as 12, so lame of them, so awesome of our moderators to fix it so quickly

Having members here who are 12 years old (and younger) may be exactly the reason for some perverts to come and check in here. That's why I have double feelings with the age notification on members accounts. I personally am glad I know the age of most young members here as I can use that to responce to their posts more effectively (leaving difficult words out I mean), but that function does have a downside too, as you all could have seen with the post Esther was talking about.
I personally can't be shocked anymore with that kind of things because I am on the internet for so many years now with so many different accounts on other sites also (Youtube, Facebook, Hyves etc) that I see things I don't have asked to see and really like to forget. The best I can do is making sure you members don't have to be confronted by those same or alike sick things.

This popped right into my head: Isn't it possible to report really bad members to the police in the country where their computer is located? This is a question for anyone who knows the answer (member or administrator alike) but feel free to answer this by e-mail as I will discuss it further with the other moderators here.