Now, I realize that the amount of spam we get in our public area is attrocious, and we're working on cleaning it up as soon as we see it. If the other admins (namely Kevin, who it appears is kinda running the show right now) think I'm overstepping my bounds on this, feel free to smack me back into place. But it's getting to the point where I can't stand going into our public OT forum, and I only do it to clean out the spam. Quite frankly, that leads me to the question of what kind of message do we send to visitors when our own members don't want to check that section of the forum? So, a couple things I've noticed that I thought should be brought up:
1) When taking out links/messages of a less than ideal nature, alot of the threads are left sitting in the forum. This has led to the public access OT forum consisting of a massive amount of useless threads, meaning actually finding anything worthwhile is becoming akin to searching for a needle in a haystack.
2) Apparently, when these messages are being cleaned up, some of the users aren't getting their IPs banned/accounts deleted/etc. Since there aren't many of us with admin capabilities, I'm guessing that what's happening is officers are toasting the posts, but not the users (since they can't).
3) Almost every one of these threads that requires "special attention" has a handful of replies to it, most along the lines of "OMG BANZOR TEH BOT!!!1!one!!2!!!eleventyone!" which, while occasionally of a humourous nature, is usually a waste of the poster's and reader's time.
So I'd like to propose the following procedures for the future regarding the plague of spam in the public section. First, when taking care of these threads, just delete them completely once the IPs have been banned, user deleted, etc. Now, since the bulk of the officers can't actually perform IP bans and such, in their case they should clean up the post and tag the thread with something to let the next admin in know that there still needs to be banning, and once the admin has finished taking care of the thread, they can delete it (unless of course there's something funny/interesting worth keeping around, like Theo's pic... ain't he so cute ). Lastly, unless you've actually got something original and funny to say, don't waste everyone's time by replying to the threads. After all, it's just going to end up getting deleted. With that in mind, I'm going to take a stretch of time, likely tomorrow, and clean out all the leftover threads. Then I have to clean my place up to, because it's starting to look nearly as bad as the forum.