Hey everyone,
I wanted to get a quick announcement put up - I haven't run this by the other staff members, but I think they'll be in agreement here. Every now and then the forum gets a flurry of spam bots or a troll here and there (think of it like motley pawfuls of vermin turning up outside the gates now and then to pester the abbey inhabitants, sometimes pretending to be weary travelers and the like). You guys usually do a great job pointing them out to the staff team and we can knock them down as quickly as they pop up.
Different kinds of bots exist. Here are some examples:
- "hello I want to learn more knowledge can you please tell me where this database comes from?"
- "DingleWriter is a platform for you to hire full time, professional writers to do work for you - and you can take credit for it! Click this link here!"
- "<insert string of expletives here>"
When you see things like these, it'd help us out if you could report them to the staff. In each post on the forum, there's a little "report to moderator" button in the bottom-right. Just click it and submit the report and we'll take care of the rest!
Having mentioned the report button, I wanted to get a little reminder out there to you all. If you're unsure about a post or are feeling uneasy about something, we want you to use the report button to let us know. The staff team and I have been putting a lot of effort into our responsiveness to these sorts of things and I think we're making good progress. We'll work with you and try to sort things out. Otherwise there's so many of you that it can be hard for us to keep tabs on everyone - even if we're skimming all the new posts every couple days!
Thanks for the help. We're hoping that we can keep pushing forward and develop strong, new relationships with each other (just keep an eye out for those vermin, wot ;))
Saw that a few of you guys reported a spam bot that got through. Thanks for the quick action (and some good humor), team! We've banned that user's IP and taken down their topics.