Spamming of forums by snake oil salespeople

[CD]

Hello NingMasters,

I know this is volunteer run and we're all busy fighting world suck and so on, but there is a big of world suck going on this site I'd like to point out (which I'm sure you've all noticed).

The "decreasing world suck help/advice" forums are more frequently being crap flooded with spam pages.  The past couple of days I've attempted to bump topics down-listed by this crap flood but it is time consuming and quite frankly boring to do when it happens every day (as is the case at the moment).

Some of those topics I noticed involved asking questions that I really think as a community we would benefit from discussing - actually all real topics on here seem to have that benefit..  You know there was this page where a person was asking for help/advice for a sick friend and it would have been on the front page if it weren't for the spam! 

So we really need to get a grip on the spam.

Is there some option real users can have to just delete these topics without being given to much mod power?  For example I'm a relative new comer to this site and I don't feel that I have the experience points necessary to make those more subtle decisions in the interest of the community, but I do know spam when I it, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only user who would be willing to delete such a page on site for the benefit of us all.

Because this is such an awesome site and such a small thing can put people off and it would stink massively if people were put off needlessly like that. 

DFTBA,

/rant

Thoughts / suggests?

[Caroline (MaintenanceNM)]

Hi,

Yes, us Ningmasters/admins/moderators are aware of the problem. There's a daily flood of spambots and we try to do our best deleting them and their posts asap, but the truth is that we're ridiculously understaffed for a website with over 70,000 members. The thing is that if we would give just any member power to delete posts, well, you could see the problem in that, maybe there would be people abusing such power. What you could do is report spam to one of the admins (there's usually at least one present in chat), or maybe, if you're really interested, apply as a Forum moderator (again by contacting one of the admins). 
 In addition, both reporting things and applying to join the admin team will be easier once the new site comes along, but we're not quite there yet. So now everything still has to be done manually.

Anyway, we try the best we can :)

Caroline 

[CD]

Wow,  for a site with 70,000 members that's actually not that much spam.  You guys must be working your batoots off.   Keep up the good work.

[David J- Operations Admin]

It's a fight we are struggling to win, so as Car said, we do our best. Staffing is a big issue we are going to be looking at in the coming weeks, and I think the Forum will be high up on the list. Thanks for this though, I am glad that there are people are still fighting the World Suck one blog at a time.

Cheers.

David J

[CD]

No worries.  Hopefully the changes will resolve some of this, too.

[Cameron Ch.]

I used to be on a muuuuuch smaller forum that had the same problem, and it's definitely a big contributor to world-suck. Thanks you guys for trying SO HARD at being awesome. It's a thankless job because if you do it right, no one knows you did anything at all, but thanks for what you do. DFTBA!

Having a simple and easy way for your members to report spambots (like maybe a button or something, or maybe I'm just being a spazz and can't find it ^^; ) would help loads.

[Larry]

Hear, hear, CD.  Felicity needs to go.