As I understand it, when the mods make a post or thread disappear, the thread actually goes into a supersecret forum from which spammers, socks, et al can never escape. After all these years I’d guess that forum has gotten quite large. Does anyone have a count for it, and how that lone forum compares with all the legitimate posts that are still visible?
I’ll bet there’s a ton of 2-3 post threads.
If you want a factual answer, it is more than 4.
That’s the secret… this IS the cornfield, and we’re all in it.
Actually most threads deleted as spam are not moved to the actual cornfield, but remain in an invisible (to non-mods) ghostly fashion in their original forums. We have banned more than 20,000 spammers in the past 10 years. Marley23 banned more than 8,000 of them, and engineer_comp_geek and samclem more than 3,000 each.
Marley needs to get his ass back here and take a swipe at some of these streaming soccer hooligans. He could double his numbers in a month.
Is that the difference between “Invalid thread specified” and “you are not authorized to view this page” messages?
Marley banned everybody! 
OK – Now I am freaking impressed!
For some reason I’m flashing back on the character of Det. Mick Belker. Bite off one little ear and people never let you forget.
kunilou, don’t put any more mods at risk by asking them for details about what is in the cornfield. GlobeDancer was the last mod to look into the cornfield, but she hasn’t been seen since, and as far as I know all traces of her have been wiped from the SDMB.
I believe it is. You get the first message on a deleted thread (although mods can still access it).
Them three-headed gophers are plum scary.
More like, “But do they call me McGregor the fence maker? NO!”
Egads - engineer_comp_geek hasn’t been moderating all that long. I assume that your friendly streaming spam poster accounts for a lot of these, but none the less, that is a massive number. A few a day. :eek:
I also assume (hope) that the need to ban legitimate posters (ie not spammers) doesn’t account for much of this effort.
So you are confirming that there is, indeed, a cornfield?
Well, that’s not its actual name, but yes, there is a forum accessible only to mods to which troublesome threads are moved. There’s also another forum only for mods for discussion among them, though I suspect that most such discussion still goes via e-mail.
So why the distinction between invisible threads and banished threads? If invisible spammer threads appear ghostly to mods, doesn’t that clutter up the thread list? Or do they sink to the bottom quickly because no one can bump them?
They may appear to mods as a different color or font. That’s what we used to do in a UBB I mod’d for a while.
It’s good that that they done that with the threads. Real good.
