A thought on Spam

Another forum I am a member of has a way to deal with spam, if a post gets x (3 I think on that forum) spam votes it is automatically hidden from view, anyone can give the spam votes. (one each) Obviously someone still has to check it is actually spam but it gets it off the site much faster. the wonderful post of pure numbers today made me think of it.

I think the staff do a great job with spam removal here.  And there is also the report button.

The staff here does amazing.  

I am pretty strongly opposed to any automatic way to suppress posts (even spam) that can be easily gamed by members.  Another forum I am a member of lets you mark posts and users as spam and then YOU don't see them anymore, and it gets flagged for admin review after X people mark it but everyone else still sees it until the admin does something. But Paul pays the bills so Paul sets the rules.

There are a lot of staff, even if you may not see everyone, and spam generally gets caught pretty quickly, but some time zones have more people than others, so it may not get caught as quickly (Skandi, I suspect that is the case for you). Still, there are plenty of people with their hand on the spam-swatting button-- if you see spam, report it, and the staff who are lurking around get to see a flag and take care of it. That helps a lot!

I see spam once a month, maybe. I report it when I do and it is usually gone in minutes. Seems like the system is working. Good job to the moderators!

This site has a lot of anti-spam features built into the software. They are super-secret, hush-hush. If we talked about them publicly, it would give spammers clues about how to circumvent them. Let's just say that about 95% of spam is detected and deleted without ever being visible to anyone in the general permies.

When spam does get by moderation, the 'report' button allows  quick feedback to the moderation team.