Observation/ Suggestion

[mrburrito]

I've noticed that there is sometimes an irrelevant topic in general chat about some "news" nobody really cares about. There are also links to free movies online which is borderline illegal. It might be a good idea to have all topics approved before posted. The "news" posts are always taken down, but blocking them altogether may be a better solution.

[EastStroudsburg13]

These posts that you are referring to are created by spambots. These are bots that go around and post links everywhere they can, and while we have some filters in place to hinder their progress, some always get through. However, we don't want to force all topics to go through an approval process.

The first reason for this is that there are lots of threads that get posted, and it would take some time to go through all of them. We would rather not have everyone wait to see their post approved, as that can be annoying sometimes, especially if there's some finite length of time that the post will be relevant. It keeps us from being too restrictive as well.

The second reason is that it would be a lot of work for the mods and admins, and we would like to keep the last remaining vestiges of normal lives that we currently cling to.

[Kokonilly]

Also, a very easy thing you can to do to help get rid of these posts is to report them as soon as you see them.

[Crazy Puny Man]

By PMing an admin or mod?

Speaking of PMing, what would happen if you PM'd a spambot...?

[zyzzyva980]

By PMing an admin or mod?

By clicking the report button in the top right corner of every post.

Speaking of PMing, what would happen if you PM'd a spambot...? :|

Nothing.

We would like to keep the last remaining vestiges of normal lives that we currently cling to. ;)

That's a good one.

[Cedavis6]

How are spambots created, anyways?

[zyzzyva980]

It all starts when a programmer, late at night, has a littttle too much sparkling grape juice, and then- well, the rest of the details are too graphic for the age range of these forums, unfortunately.

[ScienceOlympian]

Couldn't we put Captcha to eliminate Spambots?

[mrburrito]

Couldn't we put Captcha to eliminate Spambots?

What is Captcha? It sounds cool.

[iwonder]

Captchas are those weird squiggly letters you sometimes see on online sign up pages. It's an acronym for 'Completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart'(yeah, that's a mouthful) and it works because we can read the letters, but computers can't because they're jumbled up too much. I have one on our school scioly website that used to get a ton of spam, but it doesn't really seem to work as well as it should