Yeah, but don’t go reporting threads just to pad your post count!
When we delete a spam thread, “Reported” posts in that thread (and any other posts) will disappear from your post count. On the other hand, you will be credited for the report post itself, so you end up breaking even.
From the thread title, I thought this was going to be some kind of math problem, like “how many grains of sand on a beach?”
Colibri:
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.
Wow, I had no idea! Kudos to the mods for their diligence.
This is one of those jobs where the better we do it, the less people are likely to notice it.
Colibri:
The biggest single category is thread reports, which constitute about 12,000 of those threads. Each report generates a new thread. The vast majority of those reports are of spam, since a single spam post can generate many reports. About another 6,000 are “housekeeping” threads, most of which are also related to spam. Of the remainder, a lot are spam threads that got moved instead of being deleted. So the cornfield is largely made up of spam and spam reports.
In other words, it’s a warehouse of canned ham?
Yep, with a few rotten eggs thrown in.
