Originally Posted by
Canarsie
...plus, all moderators have the ability to permanently suspend the posting privileges of “spammers” who attack any forum on FlyerTalk.
I was the one who spotted that attack this morning and quashed it as soon as possible; but only Senior Moderators, the Community Director, and certain administrative staff of Internet Brands can delete content in forums which are assigned to specific moderators — as it should be.
Although there were at least a dozen threads launched by that “spammer”, I am confident that FlyerTalk members would not patronize what was being advertised. As
aBroadAbroad correctly posted — the content posted generally presented no immediate threat to FlyerTalk members; and she cleaned up the mess dumped in that forum within a couple of hours at most.
Lastly, the best way to see who is on FlyerTalk — as well as options on how to contact them — is to access
View Forum Leaders. To access this, hover your cursor over the FORUM menu option at the top of virtually every “page” on FlyerTalk; then click on the first option called
Forum Home. Then, scroll down to near the bottom to find
View Forum Leaders as one of the two options in the dark blue bar.
I hope that all of this helps...
I agree that FT members are unlikely to call the phone numbers or otherwise be immediately harmed (unless they want to risk this--maybe there are FT members who want to pay for phone sex or something similar and if so, that's their business), but by this criterion (immediate harm to individual FT members, or at least those who don't want to be harmed in this way), much of the spam could just be ignored and stay on FT.
Just so there's no misunderstanding, I'm not advocating or suggesting in any way that the spam be left intact on FT. I recognize that dealing with it is an important and especially time consuming task that must seem terribly unrewarding at times. I also realize that FT can never be "100% spam free", nor would that be a reasonable goal (because, for instance, it would be too time consuming, too frustrating, and too likely to divert attention from more important issues).
My concern when I see a spam attack focuses more on the impression that it could give to someone visiting FT for the first time. People say that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. If a (potential) newbie glances at a forum list of threads where close to half of the titles consist of this garbage, I suspect that the person would be much less likely to join or in fact ever return to FT. So in the long run I think it matters for FT, perhaps especially in the Info Desk forum which tends (by design) to attract newbies when they first land on FT.
BTW, I never before explored the View Forum Leaders link. In the past, whenever I wanted to check the list of current moderators, etc., I always tried to search for a couple threads that I know contained the magic link to the list: IIRC there was an old post by Randy in ORP and then a more recent one (here? in Community Buzz? TBT?) responding to the request for this.
Also BTW, it would be convenient if Ambassadors were added to the list.