The Race Against Spam

[~Psychotic~]

-- The following message is fairly long. You can skim most posts of
this topic but please read paragraphs 3, 4 and 5 (the last 3
paragraphs). Thank you --

If you've been living under a rock for the past few months then you
may not know that RuneScape World, along with a ton of other Google
Groups, is the victim of what looks to be a neverending stream of crap
- this crap is what we call "spam".

Spam of course, is no longer the "short pointless annoying messages"
as it used to stand for but it can be extremely long but just as
annoying. So really, it should now be considered as "PAM" lol.

The point of this topic is to tell everyone to please NOT reply to ANY
spam topics or posts you would deem as spam, offensive, deragotory or
otherwise rule-breaking topics. Yes, they're annoying, but it's
equally annoying for people to post just as pointless and annoying
replies. The main reason why replying to spam is a problem is not only
does it encourage more spam but also us managers have to not only
delete the original post but also each post under it (Google Groups
doesn't have an option to delete whole threads).

In another attempt to beat spam to the finish line, I've also put the
group on request membership. Meaning, anyone can still join but
they're going to have to request to join and then answer this
question: "What is the name of this Google Group?"

If the person doesn't answer the question correctly or at all, then
their membership request is denied and they're pressumed to be a
spambot. Yes, this may be annoying for the other managers but consider
the activity on RuneScape World now. Hardly anyone joins, posts or
does anything here and if this stops spambots then I can take a few
measly minutes from my day to accept them.

[thomasgholmes (rsn trains001)]

Quite a few of these spammers aren`t bots.
SO maybe, like I`ve been saying for a while, just moderate new members