I think it’s a great idea - I wonder if the vB permissions model is granular enough to allow it though.
…aññnnnnnd they are back. Same spam time. Same spam channel.
Most modding actions are public anyway, so it’s not like the ass. mods can jump in and take over other mod duties. And for the behind the scenes stuff, we don’t need the VB permissions mod to be granular. Just a little trust 
It won’t even have to be blind trust. I’m sure VB has a log for mod actions.
These massive spam attacks of 50+ posts happen about once/year since I’ve been a mod. Always very early morning(2-6AM EDT). Usually caught and cleaned up within an hour or so.
I got them. They hit just the time frame between a late night mod going to sleep and us early bird mods getting up. We’ll try to do better.
I got this morning’s spammer. It got off about 8 spam posts in two hours. Pretty lame spammer.
They would have to be sufficiently granular that the ‘junior mods’* could act on the spam, but not, say, have visibility of the super secret mod forums where they all talk about us** behind our backs - is what I meant.
IIRC, last time this was discussed/proposed, it wasn’t perceived as a big enough problem to warrant a solution. To us, it looks like the end of the world when it’s filling up GQ with shit, but then a mod comes along with a mop and the problem is over.
*I think these junior mods should have the title/description Spam Helsing.
**(talk about the interesting ones, that is)
I thought the super secret mod conversations happened by email. There’s a whole forum that is mods only?
As I understand it, there are secret forums where bad things get moved to and these are only visible to Mods. They were accidentally made visible for a little while, once.
I don’t know if we’ve ever been told if there are also forums where mods talk about mod stuff, but it seems like a not-implausible thing.
Nope, we talk about mod stuff on the mod loop (via email). There is a secret mod forum, but that’s where we keep track of spammers, name changes, and other housekeeping type stuff.
I am not a Dope Mod but this has all been discussed publicly. There is a mod only forum but it’s not used much. It was actually briefly visible at one time after an upgrade. It’s not used much and most of the juicy mod discussions happen over email.
All new moderators have to be approved by Zotti. He’s not interested in adding a new one at this time.
One very effective way to stop persistent spammers is to block their IP or known bad domains (like chongsoft). Only Admins can do that and the parent company won’t allow any of our staff to be an admin.
Jerry blocks IPs for us when requested. We do use IP bans as appropriate.
It’s been suggested that we attempt banning by country. When the bans are that large we get lots of email from innocent lurkers and sometimes even valued members. So the thing is to try to find a reasonable range that blocks the objectionable while allowing the users we do want and need to come on through.
Well, there was Marley’s solution of banning everyone.
sigh It sounds so peaceful.
While it is true that our admins aren’t marked as admins in the software now, a lot of folks make more out of that than they should. The admins still handle admin stuff. It’s just that they have to jump through a few extra hoops behind the scenes now to get stuff done. No biggie.
We do block IP ranges for known spammers. A few Chinese spam ISPs have sprung up in California to get around the country blocks that many message boards have. When they started spamming here, I forwarded those IP ranges to the admins and those IP ranges were blocked. The system works.
The only current repeat troublemaker that hasn’t been blocked is a particular ISP in India, and we can’t block them because we have legitimate board members inside of their IP ranges. This particular ISP carries about 15 percent of India’s internet traffic, and a lot of that is legitimate internet use and not spam. While we do get a lot of spam from India that’s not from this ISP, it’s mostly one-offs and it’s not worth blocking the entire ISP for.
Ugh.
Has there been any discussion on the topic of spam only mods?
Mmmmm… Spiced ham mods…
Yeah. Doesn’t seem necessary to us, given that episodes like this occur once a year or less – our spam barriers are pretty good, and the stuff that gets through is usually zapped stat – but we are discussing.
Discussed but not a happening thing. Not necessary.
Besides, we do not select moderators; Ed does. And moderators do more than just kill spam and that’s not how this deal works.
That was not the suggestion. The suggestion was placing new registrations from certain countries into a moderation queue for manual approval. Very very different from a country-wide IP ban. Existing posters and visitors would be completely unaffected. You won’t actually get any real new posters from those countries, but if you do you can let them through. And the spam attacks will vanish.
If you make it too difficult for people to interact with the site they’ll just drop it. New registrants to the board already have to meet a testing challenge and get email validation to make posts in the first place.
Weren’t you just commenting that we have lest posting volume than in times past? Making new registrations having to be manually moderated to start posting surely will not bring more traffic to the site, to the contrary. We need more good traffic, not less.
Not all new registrations, just those from countries that produce a ton of spam. Seriously, how many non-spam posters sign up here each year from Uzbekistan? Are you actually worried about the impact on board traffic delaying those registrations would cause?
And again, I don’t care if you guys do this or don’t. I’m just passing along a solution to the increasingly annoying problem of spam attacks that was shared with me and I found to work incredibly well. I’m not sure why this annoys you.