a community of practitioners

Spammers

I've been checking in on this forum for awhile and have been getting back into it once again as I've intensified my massage work at school and will be starting my own practice in the coming months. Reading what kinds of matters ya'll discuss is really interesting for me and I'm looking forward to being able to contribute much more as I enter into this career. :)

But I can't stand that there isn't someone going through at least once a day and deleting these spam posts. The fact that they don't get deleted is encouraging them because their link remains. They aren't posting here for us to follow their links - they're posting here to boost their Google search rankings.

And when someone comes and sees multiple spam posts on the first page, it gives the impression that the forum isn't frequently used and it might drive people away, unaware that there are frequent, quality contributions here.

Is there anyone that can spend an extremely small amount of time to check in a couple times in a day and delete these things, for the good of the community? :)

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Gordon J. Wallis on December 12, 2012 at 10:18am

Yea they are taking over.

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Permalink Reply by willows_of_saturn on December 12, 2012 at 10:33am

Most forums have an icon next to a post or thread where you can make a notification of a rule violation. The moderators (are there any? hehe) could receive a pm and email notification when someone clicks this icon and swoop in quickly to delete it.

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Permalink Reply by Abram Herman on December 12, 2012 at 1:01pm

Hi there! I'm one of the moderators on massageprofessionals.com, and we are definitely on here every day (except sometimes on weekends), actively policing the site. We've recently been inundated with spam accounts, and lately it feels like an uphill battle. The platform we use to run this site, Ning, is unfortunately a bit lacking in terms of any robust spam control features to help, so it's basically up to us to look around and remove spammers as we find them. Lately there have been so many that I've considered requiring approval for each new signup, but it's something I've been trying to avoid in order to keep the forums open and accessible to everyone.

We have a lot of members who help by bringing spammers and their posts to our attention, and that help is always greatly appreciated! If you ever see a spam post or account, scroll to the very bottom of the page and click the link in the blue footer to "Report an issue." Again, your attention to this is greatly appreciated, as it helps us remove the spam accounts as soon as they pop up so that we can keep the site clean for all of our legitimate participants.

Thanks for your help with this!

Best,
Abram Herman