Friends of Captain Awkward

You may have noticed an increase in spam posts, and that is because of an increase in spam/bot users. We're doing everything we can to deal with the situation and we're hoping to find some better solutions. For now we encourage all users to be especially careful of clicking on any links on the board.

If you are sharing a link please first consider that any link shared by users must include:
-a brief description of what the link leads to (article, movie, blog, etc)
-a brief summary of the content of the link (the topic, why is it relevant to the thread)
-any trigger or content warnings that would be necessary if it were shared on the board

Doing this is required when sharing links on this board and is helpful for your fellow users to make an informed decision whether or not to engage with the thing you are linking to.

We are also being more active in banning new and suspicious accounts, such as accounts with spam links in their signature. We are not doing proactive bans on any existing accounts with a history of posts or on accounts that do not follow the patterns of the spam bots we are dealing with. In the very unlikely event that we accidentally ban a non-spam account please feel free to contact a moderator to have that ban reversed. If you need to make a secondary account to contact us we are able to delete the extra account after we have restored your primary account.

Thank you for your patience while we deal with this situation, and special thanks to all users who have been reporting the spam posts as they show up.

-The Mod Team

I'm curious: I've been reporting the spam messages as they show up. Is that actually helpful for the mod team, or does it just create more notifications for you to sort through while the spam bots are patently obvious and you can handle them on your own?

It is very helpful to report the spam bots! Thank you and please keep reporting as you see them.

We have recently had a number of reports that spam bots are now sending PMs to users. Please make sure not to click on any links in PMs from accounts that you don't recognise and please report any suspicious messages to the mod team by clicking on the ! button at the top of the message.

We are hoping to find a solution to the bots soon.

With this increase of spam, it might be time to consider additional safety/spam block meassures that the board's tech allows, if the Admin/mod team hasn't done so already. Some I've seen on other forums are Admin/Mod approval for the first or x number of posts a user makes. Or having certain account features turned off unless you've made a certain number of posts.

Thanks Kathlynn, we are looking at options at the moment.