Report a Thread Without Reading

[xythan_shadow]

Hey flex, just a thought. If you could, could you give us a way to flag a spam thread / spammer without having to go in and read it. It would be quite convenient and would make me feel a lot better.

[drew]

Hi Xythan,

The thing with our current spammers is that somehow they are registering, and generally post 5 threads on the newly registered account. The threads will always have a link in the sig even though the response is 'somewhat' close to what's being discussed.

I try to get on about 3 times a day to look for these and do a ban/erase.

If however you find some that have been missed, feel free to pm or email me and I'll hop on and delete them.

The only prob of course is that with this sort of spamming there is no way to tell what it is without reading at least one of their threads.

[nypup2train]

Yeah, when I first read xythan's suggestion, my reaction was -- "Oh, that would be handy!" But then I thought on how that would work some more, and it worried me a bit. Given that the intention is to report a post as spam, how do you know unless you've gone in and read it? I mean, absolutely 100% for sure?

Yeah, there are frequently posts that, just from the subject line, it's totally "obvious" they're spam. But there's always the chance of being fooled, in one direction or the other, just going by the subject line. Having the reporting (and banning) controls live at the post level means that anyone using them "has to" have actually looked at the post (in theory), which is probably a safety check worth having.

(If your intent with the request, xythan, is to make it easier to "mass-report" multiple threads created by a spammer... I wouldn't worry about that. When a spam account is nuked, all of its posts are automatically scrubbed along with it. So, reporting any random one of the spammer's posts should be sufficient to get all of them dealt with.)

[WhoDunIt]

I don't know about the rest fo you guys, but I get a little pop up window with the first few sentences of the first post in it and that can, in may cases, give me enough info to tell if there's a good chance that the thread is infact that.

[Kyrosan]

WhoDunIt is correct. If you hover your mouse over the link for the post, it will give you the first few lines of the post. More often than not you can easily tell if the START of the post is a spammer. If it's spam within an existing thread then obviously it wouldn't work.