Technical Help Forum

I've been able to report using the report button but I too have noticed over this weekend that posts have not been removed as they normally would be.

May I try with your reply?

Be my guest!

With your last "reply", it seems to work:; I reported abuse/inappropriate.........

When the staff receive my report, they will be astonished!, lol!

So, what did I do to offend you, Santi? ;)

Mmmmmmmmmmm, let me think, I can't find anything (maybe you made me think about it, and it's not too nice from you, lol!)

Our new friend Favour has now been happily spamming away for three hours since he was first reported - isn't it about time that he got canned?

Now over four hours since the spammer was reported, and they still haven't been deleted. After four hours of frenzied spamming, they seem to have taken a bit of a break. Perhaps the new strategy for dealing with spammers is simply to drive them to exhaustion?

Now more than 7 hours since this spammer was reported, and they still haven't been deleted. Seems that my comment about their 'imminent deletion' was overoptimistic???

I was appalled that one of these Spammers mentioned by Cathy was busy Spamming new members. What an introduction to the site - I wonder how many immediately regretted joining it?

i received 2 VT mails from this person and also reported it as spam.Previously i cannot complain about the deletion/blocking of spammers, seems to have worked quite well.

I wonder the same, Barbara. The usual scoundrels who spam through VT mail don't bother me: report and they're gone at some point. But the idiots who systematically run through the list of new members to spam their HPs make me nuts. New members of often don't yet have a handle on the system, don't know how to delete those comments or report spam yet, etc. I wonder how many of those folks get spam mail on their first day, too. It stinks for a new member's first reply/mail/comment to be from one of these jokers. There's not much the staff can do about it - you can't filter out EVERYONE - but it's nice to snag and axe them before they hit up a couple dozen new members. I have occasionally left an HP comment for newbies behind a spam hit telling them the crap has been reported and will be gone soon - and welcome to VT.

FYI, this spammer has been resurrected in the last few minutes as bestlove13. And I do think that taking so long to delete this spammer - I gave up tracking it after 8 hours - was a disappointingly slow response and would have created a negative impression for new members, who were preferentially targeted.

bestlove13 (who seems to have undergone a gender change in the metamorphosis from fromyou134) has now been spamming away happily for an hour since their PPP indicates that they were first reported, during which time two VT staff members have been online. Very disappointing.

Catherine, I think you would do better to make your comments direct to feedback. It is very likely that the spammer is not the same person. There are, after all, hundreds and hundreds of them doing this as a job and using more-or-less the same scripts.

I have already had e-mail communication with two VT staff over this, Jane. The general gist is that the person whose job this is appears to be incommunicado because they're travelling. I would like to think that this was an important enough task to be delegated in the absence of the responsible person.

I see. Didn't realise that, obv.

Just on 4 hours, and goodlove13's still sharing the love with us all ... Have written another e-mail to VT staff about this. Spamming is bad enough, but presumably the VT staff who delete the spammers are the same ones who moderate the activity of trolls and other undesirables?

There are 20 ish people at VT. Most of them are engineers. The moderation staff is small and we need to cover 24 hours. Once in a blue moon there's an overlap of several people traveling at once. This is one of those cases...Sorry and thanks for your patience.

We just released a patch yesterday that should fix the software side of this issue. It seems to have only affected IE8 and lower. Nate

Ah yes, that's right. I had meant to come back and mention that there was also apparently a javascript error discovered yesterday that made sending reports impossible for some IE users. It was fixed a few hours later. Thanks Nate.

Thanks for the update - and hopefully finally an end to our friend Favour, whom we are now heartily sick of!

The most obvious answer would be to make several people in different timezones moderators...then these instances can be dealt with almost instantly

:) Really? :)

Yep... thats how it works on my dogsite...works pretty well too ;-)