How To Handle A Private Messaging Advertiser
 

Just wanted to make a quick poll and see what the concensus does in these situations.

If someone joins your board and sends out massive amounts of pm's to your members to advertise there site, what do you do?

Please vote and respond.

Thank You,

L E G I O N

Nuke 'em.

ban them and delete their PMs?

LOL! agreed :D

Nuke.

Move that person to the Miserables usergroup (with no PM allow). :)

I had one of those spamers on my forum, with the nickname "Patricia". Never posted anything on the board, just kept sending PMs.

when someone send a PM without participating to a community, it is ALWAYS for spam... so why do the entire process to control them.... when you are too gentle or graceful, you gain confidence from the spammers.. they will come back!

Real spammers are banned on sight on vB.org. Regardless how they spam.

If someone joins my site and sends out a single unsolicited advertising message whether its forums, VMs, PMs or elsewhere, they are banned. No questions asked.

I have minimum post count and x days registered before you can send private messages. Seems to have stopped a lot of spammers. :)

<i>Get 'em!</i>

I gave an Infraction/Warning - Delete All Pm's and I send a pm stating it's against the rules.

After that they keep going with it, immediate ban. I temp banned the last person who did this 1 day for each email sent, so like 30 day ban.

I think that the amount of spam that a board is getting is dependant upon how quick and resolute the staff handles spammers.

Spam will never be on my board for longer than 10 minutes. And 10 minutes is very long for my board.
My members know that we instantly deal with spam PM's, so they do not hesitate to report the PM. (See report PM hack)
If we would only give warnings, then we would receive less reports.

Although it is not always successful; we do report to the spammers ISP. We also trace related accounts and close them down as well.

We close accounts made with fake email addresses.
We close double accounts.
We scan all PM's with scripts to expose spamming.

If it is content relevant and there is a chance for a link exchange I usually make a futile attempt at a link exchange, but 95% of the time I delete all private messages sent by them and then ban their account.

-Raymond

i have it set up when they join they are in a group that cant pm.. they wont beable to pm until they reach so many post counts.and are in the members group...

Had one last night of someone saying, "hey, you seem like a nice person, I'd like to get to know you more". They were sending it to everyone saying "email me". I was like, could it get any lamer? seriously

Good idea....I usually ban though right away. Right now it's easy to take the time to do.:o

Thats the only way to go!


.

a quick ban, not questions asked ;)

Nuclear Launch Detected.

Immediate Ban / Ban IP/ (if real bad with dupes) ban country, but I also limit new user accounts.
- no Sigs
- no Avatars
- no PM's

Any misuse of PM's/spamming = instant permanent ban.