Solution to spam problem

i am assuming this is where we tell toms things, if its not, im sorry, and can you move my message to where it can be viewed.
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i propose a solution, now hear me out, because it gives everyone with an account some amount of power they could abuse.

there is a crap ton of spam, i believe we all know this, and the people who come here suffer the most.

i propose a second report button for anyone here that is a circle with a line through it and reads spam.

this button will flag a post for deletion, under the assumption its spam. but wont remove it with 1 press.

a second person hits the button, and its deleted from the board.

not for good, just no one can see it, and its up to mods to decide if the post was or wasnt spam.

if it wasnt, the users who hit the button are banned for a certain amount of time, and if they were right, they are rewarded.

Too many children on this forum for that to work. They used to down rate just because you had a different opinion. What they do need is to ban ip addresses for spam. Th isn't proactive enough.

Thanks for the advice.

We are waiting on a major forum rebuild and a number of users including the mods have been giving tips to the devs on this.

It has been very stressful keeping ahead of the spam and a bit of positive feedback is good.

We get a few abusive users making silly comments about the spam and the moderators, and unfortunately I have had to ban a few in the process.

Reporting the spam as soon as it pops up helps.

I log in regularly to the mod alert panel (we all do) and deal with it without mercy ... permaban for all spam (no second chances).

I then go through the IP to look if other users are using it ... and if suspicious I deal with them using a cricket bat as well.

This is a huge site and there are around 20 mods assisting the site staff ... and we do our best.

We are in different timezones all around the world.

Sorry to ramble on but I felt it important to raise.

We have given the devs a lot of feedback so far ( in the last 3 mths) and anything people tell us gets passed on.

I spend a lot of time over at TG (Toms Guide) with the news comments area (all of the news stories you see on either THG or TG's front page.

We have a crew of about 200 or more regular posters who show a lot of interest in that area as do the spammers unfortunately.

As Toms has mirrors (servers) in several languages it is a very complex site for the devs to manage.

The US site gets a lot of traffic, along with the French (PC Presence) and UK site and so on.

Toms is one of the few that genuinely tries to target a number of different languages so that makes it more complex.

You might notice from time to time there are a few of the reviews done by our German hardware reviewers and news from everywhere.

The moderators here are all volunteers ... we do it because it is our hobby.

Reporting the spam is the best way to help us tag and nuke it quickly.