[son5070]

Ogun State, Nigeria
Posts: 17209

Online

Re: The Nairaland Forum Is Now On A Break!
« #2 on: Today at 11:43:44 AM »

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At first the spammers were easy to handle. I just flushed out their accounts. Piece of cake.
Then all of a sudden, for some reason, multitudes of part-time spammers started showing up.
They would make sensible posts for months, and then one day log on and start posting junk.

"Get rich in 3 minutes!!" "Become a millionaire with just 15 kobo investment!" "Get a lucrative
job by paying us money" "NNPC is hiring (whereas they are not)" "Click this link 200 times!"
I even had to delete a technology forum "Internet" because people were posting so much junk.

Attempting to ban them only generated more traffic - in my inbox. Insults, threats a plenty.
So one day I woke up and said. Fine, you want to discuss junk topics, I'll give you a subforum.
I labeled it the "risky business" section. I relabelled it "scam-prone business" a few months later.

This may have been my big mistake. The scam-prone business section was a nice dumping
ground for spammy threads that people insisted on discussing. But it also attracted more and
more spammers and scammers to the forum. People would search for spam terms and land
on Nairaland. I thought my forum was enjoying a new era of growth. And it was, but it was
the wrong kind of growth. Spam growth. Get rich quick growth. (and membership growth)

The spammers and scammers, being who they are, were not content to post their junk in the
spam-prone business section. Oh no. They posted it in the business section. They posted it
in the Job section. In the Career section. In the Travel section. And it was my job to delete
this junk. Got to a point where the business section was getting spammed almost every minute.
you'd delete the spam threads or move them to the proper section and 10 of them will reappear
in the next 20 minutes. How would a volunteer moderator keep up with that? (I couldn't.)