When everything is going horribly wrong, remember this...

@ladyhawke001 I had the great fortune to be elsewhere. I know a number of people who were present. It still does not rank as the worst convention ever, from a dealer’s standpoint. There are several which were definitely more memorable for worse reasons.

@PooltoyWolf Flag one of the mods or employees.

@blaineg I was just going to ask how to do that! I guess just tag them in a reply? (Is there a ‘report user’ function?)

@blaineg @PooltoyWolf
The way I’ve been doing it is this:

First, to avoid added visual clutter, I tag a Whisper on the spam instead of a reply. Then I change the target of the Whisper from the author of the spam to the current list of mods (and apparent also-worth-tagging Flaskers), and use the one-word explanation of Spam as the text of the Whisper.

The current mods list I use is (minus the essential “@” symbols) narfcake RiotDemon Ignorant Extramedium Thumperchick ChadP

Please note that if the Spam is in a Reply instead of a Comment, you might see the Whisper persisting in the thread long after the spam’s been nuked - but at least it will not be visible to anyone but you and the mods.

Please use this power only for Good.

@blaineg @PooltoyWolf @werehatrack Maybe we should ask them whom they’d like us to tag so their mailboxes aren’t as full if only a subset deals with it?

Actually I will. @narfcake @RiotDemon @Ignorant @Extramedium @Thumperchick @ChadP with our lovely spam run right now which amongst you (and is there anyone we forgot?) would be best to tag about spam so we don’t clutter up everyones’ mailboxes of everyone, have you all go to look only to discover someone else has taken care of it? Well the later might not be solvable unless you have a spam button that one clicks to notify whomever is on spam duty to then go delete - if clicking spam would let us delete someone else’s post I can only imagine that wars that would happen with people deleting the posts of others on here. (not)

@blaineg @ChadP @ExtraMedium @Ignorant @Kidsandliz @narfcake @PooltoyWolf @RiotDemon @Thumperchick @werehatrack also how do you feel about whisper vs visual mesaage?

Personally I like the visual one becauae it allows a bit of smart-assery towards the spammer

@blaineg @ChadP @ExtraMedium @Ignorant @Kidsandliz @narfcake @PooltoyWolf @RiotDemon @Thumperchick @tinamarie1974 @werehatrack Yeah - and the mods delete all the references anyway. If you whisper an alert the mods will probably get duplicate tags because someone assumes they haven’t been alerted.

@blaineg @ChadP @ExtraMedium @Kidsandliz @Kyeh @narfcake @PooltoyWolf @RiotDemon @Thumperchick @tinamarie1974 @werehatrack

I appreciate any heads up on spam. Comment or whisper is fine and I’ll try to delete any related comments after deleting the spam as well as go through the spammers profile in an attempt to get any spam in other threads.

Currently tagging us is the best way to go about it if we don’t catch it ourselves.

@blaineg @Kidsandliz @Kyeh @PooltoyWolf @tinamarie1974 @werehatrack
Okay, I said this last week, but it doesn’t hurt to clarify. Your best bet is going to be me, narfcake, and Ignorant. We’re all west coast so we’re around more of the busy hours and seem to be the fastest to respond in general. ChadP and Thunderchick are great backups, but they’ve got busier lives than I do and they’re not up as late most nights.

As for how to report, just @ one or all of us, whisper or otherwise. There’s no button or “best method” and the accounts we’re getting a lot of lately are all throwaway emails, so it doesn’t matter if you reply to them publicly or not, or if you sass them or not. Chances are, they’ll never know if anyone saw their spam or not. I certainly don’t mind if you heckle them a bit, but again, they won’t know or care.

Thanks for letting us know when you see junk messages. Seems like “they” have written up a simple bot that makes a random gmail account, makes a matching meh account, and then dumps those scam links 9-10 times and then starts over within a day. Because each is unique I’m not sure if there’s any way to prevent them, so it’s just part of life for now.

@blaineg @ExtraMedium @Kyeh @PooltoyWolf @tinamarie1974 @werehatrack Maybe have meh make a simple bot that requires anyone with their first message to meh to identify several rounds of stop lights, bicycles, etc. and they can’t make a second message until they got the first one “right” and were able to actually post? Not being a programmer I have no clue how hard that is… but it could be solution if the entire thing is bot action.

@blaineg @ExtraMedium @Kyeh @PooltoyWolf @tinamarie1974 @werehatrack At least it isn’t the ‘meet Ukrainian girls for sex’ spam I get daily in my email each with a different email address and no subject line. That would not be good if there are minors on here nor would be safe for work.

@blaineg @ExtraMedium @Kidsandliz @Kyeh @PooltoyWolf @tinamarie1974 Thirty-plus years ago, back when the Web was still a New Thing, and Usenet still had tons of users, there were several binary-file-sharing newsgroups that I tended to monitor. Spam would pop up from time to time, but it tended to be targeted to the subjects of the groups.

And then a thing happened. Some East European slimeballs started spamming things like font file groups, using kidporn images as a come-on for their pay-for-access hardcore porn websites. As you might imagine, a small number of us went into hunter-killer mode and started chasing down the sites and getting them swatted. On a good day, I’d kill a dozen of them within ten minutes of when they started their spam runs. I got pretty good at it, often causing an entire freshly-allocated /16 IP block to get zapped (taking down what was putatively an ISP in the process) when I saw the flags that told me I was dealing with a bunch who had decided to try to hide behind a fence they controlled themselves. I even got death threats from alleged Russian Mafia types (Yeah, right.) Anyway, after about a year of this, somebody in each of several law enforcement agencies finally wised up enough to take out the worst of the supply-side offenders, and some lower-level agencies established honeypots to attack the problem from the consumer side, and I was able to step away from it. But it was an adventure, in its own way.

@blaineg @werehatrack Thanks much! Will do.

@ExtraMedium @Kidsandliz @Kyeh @PooltoyWolf @tinamarie1974 @werehatrack

Many years ago on rec.motorcycles a newbie joined in and immediately started on about how Harley Davidson is the one true religion, and the usual “jap crap” and “rice burners” drivel.

Unsurprisingly for a group whose motto is “Live to Flame, Flame to Live”, some, well, strongly held, differing opinions were expressed. Along with no small amount of ridicule and derision.

Thin skinned Mr. Newbie lost his mind and started making death threats. Now we all loved a good argument, or even a flame war, but death threats are a bit much.

Within minutes some of the network wizards dug up and posted the guy’s real name, and home and work contact information. Mr. Newbie went abruptly silent once the veil of anonymity vanished.

Typing that out, it does sound a bit creepy, but this was a decade or more before “doxing” became a thing. It seemed like a bit of frontier justice at the time.

@blaineg @ExtraMedium @Kidsandliz @PooltoyWolf @tinamarie1974 @werehatrack WOW!