Mod post

[lyndz.livejournal.com]

So I guess having two absentee moderators is pretty much worthless. I'm taking nominations to add another couple to the list. I apologize for all but abandoning LJ.

Comments

[oslo.livejournal.com]

Spam isn't a good thing. But if spam doesn't have the technical effects you say it has (and, to be clear, I'm taking your word for it), then the only question left is whether it's disrupting the community. We just haven't seen that happen here.

When you say that spam attracts spam - how does that work, exactly? Since you mention user-triggered malware, is the mechanism essentially that people follow spam in communities like this, which attracts more spam to this community? I'd previously taken you to be suggesting that its mere non-deletion was sufficient to attract further spam.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

When you say that spam attracts spam - how does that work, exactly?
I'd previously taken you to be suggesting that its mere non-deletion was sufficient to attract further spam.

Places where spam isn't cleaned up are noted by spammers as places where spam isn't cleaned up. Spam accounts that are not banned return to the same place and spam more, since obviously people aren't blocking spammers. That happened here recently: I pinged Wes to note a spam comment, and that user repeated the same comment repeatedly on different posts over the next days.

For a while on Livejournal, the spam comment that didn't have a spam payload but was meaningless was very common - they were testing to see who ignored spam, and people who ignored it got dozens after a short delay. These days, LJ doesn't have that kind of cachet - instead, spammers go straight to OpenID comments, and a few hours after the initial one passes muster without deletion they start hitting everything in sight. It's all automated.

*in addition*, spam contains malware, which often tries to steal social media credentials, for the purpose of using your account to spread more spam. And those attacks tend to target places you have posting access, but that's more a "it sucks for you to have spam appear here" problem and less "spam here creates more spam here" because they'll probably use your LJ OpenID to spam Gawker - livejournal itself is a weak target.

My point is, spam should not be tolerated because it is an absolute evil. And there are methods available to stop spam without otherwise altering the community - even if you don't trust me when I say "spam only, I'll do that", I'd trust *you* if you said you would delete spam and ignore non-spam moderation issues. And there are pre-existing problems related to "nobody is deleting spam in a timely way" here. And my aim isn't to moderate non-spam issues; I think those should be addressed, but they're not the topic and they're not immediately relevant. I want there to be people watching for spam, deleting spam, and available to be notified that yet another spammer is spamming a community I watch.

And Livejournal doesn't let non-moderators report spam when it happens in communities, let alone delete spam comments. So that means the spam cleanup crew have to be moderators.