Dear Spammers From around the world...Follow

...I know none of you will read this, which is a shame.

The people that regularly read this board do not need your kitchen, relationship or financial advice. We have nothing against Nigeria but are unwilling to help the numerous "princes" that seem to need our urgent intervention.

As such, you are wasting your time multiple posting here. Surely there are other more lucrative locations for your predation?


At the very least, recognize your audience is a mature group of gamers. Arguably: intelligent, stubborn, nostalgic gamers (look at the game we are playing, odds are more of us own Sega Genesis sitting in a closet than a current Xbox)... so at least aim your pitch at our interests? No... scratch that. Just go away. That is the best solution.


To those reading this after admn nukes the latest... informative spam poster <cough> ...know that they laid down 8+ worthless threads. All of which I am going to rate down, even though I know they will be nuked.

I got a simple solution for the programmers here.

Don't let anyone with a "new" account (just made and/or zero post count) make more than one post in 15 minutes.

Or, alternatively, if anyone who is new (as described below) makes more than 2 new posts within 15 minutes, delete the posts automatically and cancel/ban the account.

I'm registered on other forums and they take actions like this to discourage and remove spammers.

Or, as a simple start, require a given post count before a new poster can start a new thread. Doesn't prevent spamming in existing threads, but at least prevents the problem of whole threads that have to be nuked (which in turn dorks up the thread listing on the front page).

How many legitimate new posters actually start out creating new threads? Most people start out posting in other threads first, then start creating their own threads as they gain more familiarity with the forum. I suppose this could be inconvenient for the occasional new person who creates an account in order to ask a question about whatever game they're playing, but those questions almost always could be asked in an existing thread (there's usually at least something along a similar topic to what you want to know). I'm honestly not familiar enough with the posting patterns on most of the gaming forums here to know how much of an inconvenience this would actually be.

An alternative (which would require a bit more coding) would be to have all threads created by posters below a certain post count appear in a "new user forum" regardless of where they actually attempted to create the thread. The admins now have one spot to look for spam to nuke, and can move actual real threads created by actual real users to their respective forums. This method will trick the spam bots into not realizing they're being blocked, whilst solving the problem of threads choking up forum pages. The downside is that someone has to check through the new user forum to nuke the spam threads (but that actually should be a time savings compared to right now), and you'll have to deal with the inevitable "where did my thread go?" questions. Stickies with information (and informative helpful veterans) can alleviate this though.

Lots of possible solutions IMO.

No holds please, I came here because of the soe domain loss, looking for answers and then found myself finally posting something I wanted to for eons and never did.

I like that fold in FAQ idea and a few others. Great minds....

"new poster delay between threads"... I like it.

This level of spam is ridiculous...At the moment there are 23 back to back "threads" by a troll from the subcontinent.

They probably use this site as they saw Allakhazam while looking for targets to spam their wares.. as they think it sounds like it is indigenous name/site from their region...

I agree, its time to limit the amount of posts that a new account can post on the threads. Sadly some genuine new posters would be affected but it devolved to this point.
It almost looks as if the spammer got vex when seeing the title of this post so he/they decided to ups the ante, thus 23 posts of spam from the reprobate.

Time for preventative action !

Edited, Jul 22nd 2014 7:19am by hexeez

I reported those threads (well not all, I reported one and noted that the forums had 20 or so others). But they really need to put some kind of controls in for this; anti-spam code. I bet it's not that hard to do.

Forum spam has gotten absurd now. At least it's only 6 today, but it really is a turn off to visit the forums.

Another 8 this morning. This is now practically a daily occurrence. And it pisses the snot out of me. Can't fricken stand it!

I'm sort of glad they fixed the everquest skin. I always had a super long scroll bar because of the unorganized footer. But that's been in need of fixing for years. The spam problem is more recent and critical.

I'll still thank them for fixing the footer. It's been so long that it's been broke (in looks, I think the links still worked) it's freaking me out that it looks so good.

Yther Ore.

The real irony is they're completely wasting their time and effort. Anyone seriously believe browsers here are clicking those links?

Of course, the whole process is automated, no doubt, so it's the blind leading the blind---and they're all robots! LOL

I feel for you.

Know you efforts are appreciated. It's nice to see an admn post here, we don't thank you guys & gals enough. I always get a kick out of finding a random Fleven post thanking someone for an updated deep in some obscure quest/item thread.