Moderators asleep on the job?

[Uallas Borgin]

Pages and pages of spam. Are the moderators asleep, is the forum's security so bogy that they can't block the ip of this so called indian wizard? 

[Sassy Romano]

Pretty much.  In the JIRA that I created, they wrote it off as "Unactionable".  Says it's all.

I would prefer if there were no moderators, I'd rather it be handled by Linden employees only, see if it got escalated any faster than just fobbing the responsibility off to elsewhere.

[Coby Foden]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

Pretty much.  In the JIRA that I created, they wrote it off as "Unactionable".  Says it's all.

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I have created a bug report too. No actions so far.

Maybe we should start spamming the JIRA with requests "do something with the forum spam"?  :smileytongue:

 

 

PS.

I counted fourteen pages of spam in this forum alone! :smileyfrustrated:

[MIstahMoose]

It confuses me. Even the lowly freely hosted forums that I can grab in an instance have protection against this kind of spam. How does a larger company like this not

[Ren Toxx]

It's worsened alright... and heavily so. Not so long ago it used to be in waves of around 15 pages before the moderators started acting; recently it had climbed to about 23 pages.

 

Today it was well over 55 pages which, at 20 threads per page, and even discounting the occasional non-spamming post that got through, means we've clearly passed the 1,000 spam-posts mark... in each wave. Considering there's several waves each day, I wouldn't be surprised if it neared 2,000 daily spam messages.

[Venus Petrov]

Spam is the 'view' outsiders looking in get of LL-sponsored fora.  LL apparently prefers it this way or it would disappear.

[Sassy Romano]

Indeed, when someone thinks of SL, the first thing that comes to mind from a Google search would be "Mumbai Prostitutes".

[Pussycat Catnap]

LLs favorite metric is to claim hundreds of thousands of signups to SL every month.

But almost all of those are the spambots we see in this forum - and not even real people, let alone even bots that know the SL client exists or that there is a virtual world called Second Life.

They're just web crawling bots that sign up on any online registration system that is unprotected and has SEO that appears similar to a forum, blog, mailing list, or other form of dialog.

LLs could stop them all, instantly with either or both of two simple measures:

1. A captcha system to register. Bots can crack these, but most cannot - and it will cut the spam signups from a few thousand per day to maybe 4 or 5 a week.

2. Moderation of first post. Simply require a moderator to approve your first post before you gain posting privileges. This stop none of the spam "attempts" or signups - but it makes them never hit the public.

 

The problem is that the first of these measures would KILL LLs favorite metric. It would reveal the truth, that this is a 10 year old MMO that gets maybe a dozen new accounts a month, period.

But it would also boost LLs least favorite metric: retention. The truth is that almost everyone who signs up for SL stays in SL. Almost everyone... but not almost everything. If you get rid of all the 'thing' signups, you'd suddenly see that SL has very rock solid retention, absolutely no new user problem, and people actually do learn the UI and find things to do here...

- Despite being a 10 year old MMO, its pretty stable. But they are so blinded by that signup number that they refuse to take the hit on one metric in order to be able to revel in the other metric.

 

As for the second measure... it just takes assigning someone to moderate first posts. This is a trivial task that takes about1 minute per 20-30 posts... and most of them would be spam one could disaprove quickly anyway. There's no reason they fail here, other than lack of understanding of how to run an online forum among whoever is making the management decisions for policy here (I doubt its the actual moderator. Having been in that position before, I remember arguing in meetings in order to get approval to take the steps I knew would work, against managers who feared 'angering one legit poster' more than they feared the negative SEO impact of 100 spam posts... Until I did it anyway without permission, and a sort of "oh you weren't just referring to that other blocker technique?" excuse, and then presented the metrics from analytics and our adwords campaigns a month later and showed that lack of spam earned us an additional 20% in revenue in an off month).

 

[Hoppimike]

haha yeah it was flooded