Player Discussion on How to Resolve Unsolicited Advertisements in the Forums

After noticing the tags in a recent unsolicited advertisement post for an Inf "trading" website, I realize we probably shouldn't be having the discussion on how to solve the problem in that thread. That post is just going to get mod-deleted (and hopefully soon).

So, let's see if we can't come up with some solutions to this problem.



The idea of having trial accounts restricted from posting normally sounds like it could be really frustrating for legitimate players on the trial accounts, and I believe that several of the "traders" actually have subscriptions anyway, so if they really want to, they could just post using those. It's true that the text filter for "profanity" can only do so much, but I think it might be better to have a forum Moderator whose job it is to add as many various permutations of these web addresses as possible to that profanity word list.

Have trial accounts censor numbers and the dollar sign?

Could always just do the sensible thing: report the post if it hasn't been already, and post in a different thread in the same subforum in order to bump the offending thread off the main page of the forums.

EDIT: Alternately, they could go back to what they used to do a long time ago (I think) and have each new forum registration require manual approval.

Another suggestion:
Allow players to moderate the issue. I don't know how much power this forum software would allow, but if some active forum users could be given a specialized mod-right, that might do the trick.
All Trial-Account posts will start invisible, and be listed on a digest (which is only accessible by those who have been given this responsibility). Then these selected users can sign off on which are advertisements. Three votes of a post being an advert will cause it not to be posted. Any message which doesn't receive any votes will be posted publically after a few hours.
Give a little warning message to all trial users that this function is in operation when they hit the "Submit Reply" or "Post Message" buttons.


A rather unwieldy solution, but it would at least reduce the official mods' workloads if the problem becomes severe enough to warrent.

I've stopped posting on that "other" thread, so I'm going to repeat the last idea I wrote.

Maybe restrict trials to trials forums? Have a number of trusted community members mods those forums (and only those forums) to remove spam (and only spam).

Thus, new players can ask questions and get help, but the spam is contained, plus there'll be more mods to deal with it in those sections.

I don't think they'd ever add "legal" Inf purchases to the game - it could wreck the markets.

Yeah - I think player moderation would be a bad idea on several levels - plus, it'd be a heck of a lot of work for them to set up, especially when banning trial accounts from posting would be so much simpler, even though it'd hurt new players.

Zikar's idea sounds good. Also if there is a post that some how pops up here I say don't respond to it. All it does is just brings it up front. I say just report it, and ignore it.

Actually TheOcho will be checking in all weekend. He can't do that 24/7 obviously. But I'm guessing there will be lots of deletions by noon tomorrow.

It's most likely coz it's a holiday weekend and the a**hats are just taking advantage of the hope that the mods are all on a three-day weekend. Ocho, however, after I PMed him earlier this morning about this mess, is doing what he can to stay on top of things (or call in help as needed).

EDIT: Incidentally, question - how about limiting trial accounts to a) not being able to start threads except in PLAYER QUESTIONS, and b) limiting how many posts per day they can make?

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Limiting posts per day won't do much since they can just make a single post.

I suggest that it should be possible to temporarily HIDE a trial account post if tons of people click a button to vote to hide it, until mods can review it.