maemo.org - Talk - Spam Moderators needed

There have been problems lately regarding spambots registering and spamming the forum. There has been a lot of discussion about it on this thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=76825

While I have added a lot of plug-ins on the forum software to minimize the automated registration and posting, there seem to several who can bypass them.

This thread aims to request for volunteers to help with the eradication of these spammers. We only need a maximum of 4 volunteers with good standing (no infractions) and hopefully from different continents so majority of the time zones can be covered. If there are more than 4 volunteers, we will choose the most active and helpful ones, from different time zones. Those who are not selected will be put standby just in case we need more in the future.

If you are interested, please reply on this thread not later than October 3, 2011 with the following:

I would like to volunteer as a Spam Moderator.

Location: <your country>

Why are there so much spam?

Good question. A lot of these spam posts are made by spambots -- software that automatically registers to multiple forums, and post multiple spam posts so they can promote a product or website. To give you an idea how they do it, here's an old demo video of a spamming software:

http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/b.../24/xrumer.swf

Note that this video was made around 2007. Imagine how much it has changed and how intelligent it has become to defeat anti-spam plug-ins in forums.

What do you have to do?

It is really not as hard as you might think. If you see a spam post, all you have to do is click on the author of that post, and as a Spam Moderator, you should see a "One-touch Ban & Clean" option:

http://content.screencast.com/users/...09-30_1323.png

Once you click on it, if the member is less than 30 days old a confirmation screen will be displayed:

http://content.screencast.com/users/...09-30_1324.png

Hit Confirm and it the system will do the rest -- delete all posts, ban the user, ip, and add the user information to the global spammer database.

http://content.screencast.com/users/...09-30_1324.png

That's it!

if in case a spammer is more than 30 days old and it won't let you ban and clean, PM me and I'll take care of it.

Thanks for those who have been actively reporting spammers and proposing solutions. Thanks in advance for those who intend to volunteer to help.