UKC

Paul was working hard before Christmas producing a much better spam filter for the forums. Spam had become something of a plague in recent months and we did count 58 spam reports for one post in December when none of the moderators were around for a couple of days. Thanks to everyone who made the effort to report these.

The new system seems to be picking up more than 95% of spam which is great. If you do see something then let us know using the usual Report Abuse. We have also had a couple of false-positives during testing so let us know if this happens to you although it is likely to only affect new users. This means that the For Sale Forum will still produce the regular reports! 

Alan

For those posts that do slip through on occasions when there are no moderators online, why don't you make a certain number of spam reports from longstanding users hide the post automatically until a moderator can review the decision?

That was sort of the system we were trying to set up after the 58 report incident, however Paul got involved with something much more sophisticated. It is actually a much better system since we don't do anything, it just nukes the spam, bans the account and sends an email to Paul and me to check for false positives. 

If we find some slipping through then we may look at something like you suggest.

Alan