What kind of forum would that be...

The moderators simply need more power - an option to mark posts as spam and delete (or hide) threads. This shouldn't be hard to implement. 

What kind of forum would that be...

One without (X) Deleted threads! 

Moderated new threads with options to Publish / Reject into Thread X/y/z / Reject as spam, would seem sensible to me. It would mean a slight delay to threads but since they are supposed to be long term discussion threads I think that would be okay? 

Up the number of sticky threads to be a nice round 10? To have some more useful stickies so that people can get their questions answered more readily...

How about:

Modding/coding help.
Custom engine help.
Modelling help/screenshots/etc.

??? 

Potentially, it would reduce the incentive to create a discussion thread even more. The "slight" delay may easily be several hours, judging from how the approval of news threads works at the moment (either in the morning or the evening func-time, rarely in between).

The current amount of spam certainly doesn't justify such drastic measures, in my view. 

- coding help
- modelling help
- "other games"

Note: I still think the current separation of "other PC games" from "other console games" is retarded considering that most of the games talked about in the PC thread are just bloody console ports anyway. 

I think my first step will be adding moderator powers, without requiring approval (so threads are instantly live, but moderators can close them.) 

The most reasonable. 

 

Only reason I gave up moderation power was because I couldn't delete all of Shambler's threads and posts, so I agree. 

moderators have a couple of new powers now.

1. when editing a thread, you can change status between three choices: "normal", "closed", and "censored". Closed threads are still visible to the public but don't accept new posts. Censored threads are completely hidden (but not deleted from the database.)

Our policy should be to censor spam threads (i.e. spambots posting google bait) and to censor duplicate threads (e.g. user posted identical info into two threads by accident, or created both a news and a discission thread because they were uncertain.) If a thread is not spam or dupe, but just misguided (e.g. it should have been posted to mapping help,) then we should post a non-snarky explanation of why, and close it, so they (and others) can learn from their mistake. We shouldn't be deleting title/body of the thread when closing it, because that confuses people, since they won't know which thread it is anymore.

2. When viewing posts, there is now a tiny link next to the byline of each post that says "spam" -- if you click it it will flag it as spam, and then there will be a link that says "unflag" in case you made a mistake. These links us AJAX to update the page without reloading it, it has worked for me for several months but let me know if you find bugs with this feature.

Policy: only flag posts that are really spam, not just because they are annoying. 

Makes sense, will use carefully. 

or did you change the background color? 

no change to the background, must be something on your end 

reboot did the trick 

don't forget to change spam threads to "censored" instead of "closed" -- closed threads are still visible. 

will do it right from now on. 

 

ლ(ಠ益ಠლ) 

Was trying for this: http://www.blameitonthevoices.com/2011/02/y-u-no-emoticon.html

No support for Japanese (?) characters?

Mark the above posts as spam please ;) 

i don't really have a very good system for handling charsets... i think the server is set to Western European or something, the html don't include a charset, there's occasional bugs with weird characters breaking the RSS feed (em dash, copyright symbol, trademark symbol, zertstorer O with the umlaut on it. These don't seem to be causing much of a problem for us so I haven't really investigated what I would need to do to encode everything correctly. 

you are using htmlspecialcharacters after htmlentities I guess. 

Ban / auto-reject anything from linseo****blog 

It's really getting to be annoying. 

I think the time has come, because now they keep spamming the news threads (thus fucking up their order).