Steepster does their best (I appreciate their work!)… annoying spammers… how does that ever work for them?
I don’t think there are more spammers specifically targeting this site than other websites. So if we see more spam here, I would assume it is because the owners of this site are not dealing with it effectively.
What do you mean? “Hot and Sexy Call Girls in Pune” is totally relevant to tea drinking and my personal interests :P
Creating an account on Steepster should require the use of recaptcha and probably a confirmation email. That would stop most of the junk. Next step is to require new posters to have their first few posts approved before they show up on the board – problem is that requires moderators, which we don’t have.
Are there really no moderators? On a board like this with a smallish core group of users it should be easy to find plenty of people who want to help out. This seems like the real solution to the problem; site owners don’t even have to do extra work or pay anything.
Yes, in practically all hobby sites, moderators are primarily composed of unpaid volunteers.
There was some moderators who were helping (I can think of 2 people who were) but not sure what happened to them.
There are some folks here with the authority to delete spam and the offenders account with some limitations. Problem with this is the spam gets publicly posted first.
There are some moderators, but I honestly haven’t checked in a looongg time how many are still around (I can’t even remember who they specifically are). I might be able to create more, but I’d have to check to see if that’s still possible…
If that works, would anyone be interested? I really just gives you an option to mark a user as a spammer on their profile page and is only to be used in cases where the person is posting content that is obviously not related to tea (people who are abusing the ratings system or just being disruptive should not be marked as spammers). I’ll check and see if that still works.
I would help moderate, I work from home, and try to post in the spammers thread anyway. This would save someone else going in and deleting it after the spammers post.
I would also be more than happy to moderate as I usually lurk on Steepster all day even when I’m not posting. I am sure there are more than enough other currently active folks here who would be willing, as well. It sucks to see our discussion board overtaken by spam and I remember when I came back to the site after not using it for a few years it gave me the impression that it wasn’t really active at first.
Sites I am involved with use StopForumSpam.
An admin sets it up, someone with permissions tidies up the ones not caught.
It is not infallible but it is one of the best tools out there at this time. Free though owners may donate.
Bottom line is using layers because bots are persistent and may not have been reported into spam databases before they hit a site.
Sad part was Steepster was nominated for a Tea Community award at World Tea Expo this year. You’d think that recognition would motivate Steepster to update.
Well, we have Slack at least.
I haven’t been on here in months and am surprised at how much spam there is. The whole first page of the forum is spam! I’m guessing the disinterest in keeping the site up has to do with it not bringing money in and bills needing to be paid. I’ve enjoyed this site a lot over the years and it is sad to see it being neglected. I wish there was a way for it to bring money in and be more self sufficient. :/
FWIW, I posted a while back with a couple thoughts of my own on the situation. You can check that here: https://steepster.com/discuss/16168-why-is-steepster-such-a-spam-target
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