Last night, some idiot logged on as a guest and proceeded to link to about 25 or more XXX porn sites. (I had to click on several to make sure…hey, research and all.)
At any rate, I tried to report the thread, but when I clicked to report it, I got some variation of a message that said, “you do not have the authority to do this” (I don’t remember the exact phrase, but that was the upswing.)
Is it no longer possible to report such threads to the mods?
It’s possible the thread had been moved to a hidden forum between the time you clicked to open it and the time you clicked to report it. My guess is if you don’t have authority to read a hidden forum, you don’t have authority to report threads in one.
Just a guess.
I think Garfield226 nailed it.
It got disappeared while you were, um…, making sure it was spam.
Hmm…that doesn’t make sense as I was able to post in the thread twice - once stating that I thought this thread wasn’t going to last long…and awhile later posting again that perhaps I was wrong and the moderators had all been at the Christmas party and were sleeping it off…
At any rate, the thread has disappeared, and was just wondering why I wasn’t able to report it.
It was vile stuff…page after page…I had to wade through pure filth, over and over and over again…shocking, I tell you, shocking. But someone had to verify it was not appropriate, so I stepped up to bat for you guys and took it upon myself.
Well, your last post in that thread was at 5:02 a.m., and MEBuckner removed it at 5:03 a.m. (all times, CST), so Garfield226’s right: you probably tried reporting the post after it had been moved.
Hmm… I find the thread, and I do see your posts. Did you try to report it before, or between, or after, those posts? It was taken away one minute after your last post. (Literally - 4:02 and 4:03)
OK, Skip, you’re on the list.
You’re old, I’m young. It happens.
Oh, yeah? Well, the thing about us middle-aged people is… ah… um… er…
Look, I’ll get back to you, all right?
He needs a nap.
I have been fighting this scum for a while on another board I administer. Most seem to come from Russia and they are highly automated. Some don’t even try to post, but seem satisfied with registering. I can think of only two reasons why they bother: they plan to come back later and post in a flurry before being caught, or the links they put in their profiles are alone enough to justify the effort.
Or they just like the thrill of disruption and vandalism.
SDMB has one big advantage over many boards in that full privileges aren’t available without paying, something these dudes are unlikely to do.
There is a feature in vB that forces new members to be approved by the mods before they can post. I’m sure our esteemed admins don’t want to spend the time to do that and it would delay registering, but it could be enabled if they wanted to.
I think the answer is that ME Buckner can remove posts with one hand tied behind his back quicker than you can report a bad post by typing with one hand… 
If the user’s birthdate is March 28, 1983 or January 1, 1980, it’s a spammer.
If the email address is cashette.com, mail.ru, web.de., gawab.com, portsaid.cc or many other .cc, .ru, and .info domains, it’s a spammer.
BTW, the bots cracked the vBulletin 3.0 and 3.5 captcha. The 3.6 captcha, with custom fonts, is almost impossible to crack.
I have to ask the obvious question (which probably has an obvious answer, but I can’t think of it) - why? I can see January 1 being an obvious choice (but why 1980), but March 28? Or am I being whooshed?
28 March 1983 is the default date used in the birthday field by the Xrumer forum spambot from Russia. 1 January 1980 is the default date used by Forum Poster, another Russian bot. Other Russian spambots include ForumSender and Forum Promotion Suite. Why they’re all from Russia, I don’t know.
At Fathom, both are true.
Because they often disable the spam links but leave the edited post for people to mock, the guy’s homepage link at the top of it can last a long time.
This increases the number of sites linking to the porn site, as far as search engines know.
Come to think of it, SDMB’s practice of moving posts to a hidden forum may keep the links alive for search engine reference counting.
Don’t bask in smugness for long. Just give it time.
FYI: Captcha
If the posts aren’t hidden, they can’t be searched. Besides, Google doesn’t crawl the SDMB.
Message board administration best practice is to move their posts to a hidden forum. This allows spam to be studied to find common elements or patterns that may be useful for fighting it later on.