No Staff Online

[Jazzy]

I just, for the heck of it, checked out an old forum where I used to be a member. I noticed that there is no staff online and the members are having a free-for-all. One of the biggest rules on this forum is that you cannot post a link to your site. There must have been at least (I kid you not) seven members who have just posted their links. One link, as a matter of fact, is a porn link as I clicked it because of the name.

I also saw two spam bots spamming like there's no tomorrow.



What would you do as a forum owner if this was happening to your site?

 

[The Dragon Master]

Get rid of them ALL!! XD



Give a stern talking to. Or get more staff XD

 

[Evil Eye]

If it's come that far you probably might as well close it

 

[Raven]

Spam bots are a nightmare. If you let them post on your forum they will take over pretty quick and they can destroy your forum.



I don't join forums if there is a hint of spam like that.

 

[Jazzy]

Just checked again and more members are posting their links. I then checked the staff list and this forum has 10 moderators, two co-admins and one admin. There isn't one to be found.

 

[Raven]

They've probably finished with it. but instead of closing the board, they have just left it. Sad to see that happen. But spammers will overtake that forum now.

 

[Jazzy]

They've probably finished with it. but instead of closing the board, they have just left it. Sad to see that happen. But spammers will overtake that forum now.

This Free Sample/General Discussion forum has been around for 8 years and has over 18,000 members. I highly doubt they are finished with it. What they should be finished with is no staff watching the forum. Hey, maybe I'll sign up there and keep posting the link to Off Topix over and over again.

 

[Raven]

Well I can't understand why all the staff wouldn't be about if they hadn't :/ Thats just weird.

 

[Jazzy]

I contacted an old friend of mine to see if she's still a member there. She said she is and when I told her what was going on, she said it might be because the Admin announced she'd be on vacation for three weeks. Maybe the staff are angry or perhaps they're all just too busy.

 

[Cranos]

That's gonna be one hell of a surprise when she's back XD

 

[Flurry]

I contacted an old friend of mine to see if she's still a member there. She said she is and when I told her what was going on, she said it might be because the Admin announced she'd be on vacation for three weeks. Maybe the staff are angry or perhaps they're all just too busy.

Oh yeah, that admin ain't gonna be happy o.0

 

[Jazzy]

Back to the original question:

What would you do as a forum owner if this was happening to your site?

 

[Raven]

Delete it all. Ban the offenders. Happened to me years ago took a while to get back to nomal. I pmed all staff if they couldnt be active. I had to demote them and find active replacements.

 

[Cranos]

Take the forum offline temporarily, get rid of the spam and ban or warn the offenders and then get it back online.

 

[Jazzy]

Take the forum offline temporarily, get rid of the spam and ban or warn the offenders and then get it back online.

That's exactly what they did. I don't know about banning or warning offenders, but this forum has been offline all day today. Must be some huge cleanup they are doing.

 

[BeautifulAngel]

A lot of people already said this but lock up my website, clean it up, ban the members who were disrespecting the rules and talk to the staff since there should be at least one staff member on your site at all times.



Though I shouldn't say anything because with my website I'm up all night making sure I don't get any spammers since all of the mods are in the same time zone and I don't have enough people on the site for too much staff and I recently had a hacker who deleted all of my members so now I had to start from scratch >.< Stupid hackers.

 

[James]

I'd just ban all of the bots and their IPs and then contact any inactive staff.

 

[Kasynlie]

I'd temporarily close the site and get it cleaned up throughly. Then posting a new thread outlining what is expected of members should it unfortunately happen again.

 

[Ashley]

Wow, now if that isn't pathetic, I don't know what is! It's pretty obvious that the site has been abandoned and the staff no longer cares about it, because if the members and bots are having a free-for-all, there isn't too much else as to what that could mean. I've seen a few sites like this in my time, and it's actually kind of funny, in a way. Like any other situation, it gets old after a while, though.

 

[McConnaughay]

One link, as a matter of fact, is a porn link as I clicked it because of the name.

Was it TwoFingerPussyDance.com? Cause that's a cat massaging website.