I pissed off a spammer!

[Soulstealer]

Now, if one of our legitimate members somehow misses the "no selling" rule and posts something, normally we'll take it down and give them a polite warning about it.

So does that mean you'll say no to my post about how you can get 3 inches bigger?

[Mriswith]

When it comes to spammers, we have no heart.

It's comments like this that make me wish this forum had some sort of up-voting system.

[MadMike]

It sounds like the spammer was trying to post right her on Customers Suck, with his spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam, but poor meanie mods cockblocked him.

Yep, we don't make it easy for spammers. We have quite a few IPs and domains banned, so a lot of the time, they can't get in at all. And if I see a new user with a weird-looking name, I'll check it against the spammer database, and ban it if it's determined to be a spammer. And even if they do manage to get a post in, nobody but us mods will see it until we approve it. And if it's a spam post, we're not gonna approve it. And they can't PM people until they establish a posting history and we're convinced they're not a spammer. That became necessary a few years back when these crooks would download the user list and then PM spam every single person. In fact, they can't even view the user list now. I also used to actively hunt spammers (there's certain criteria that gives them away), but I haven't been as vigilant with that lately.

Now, if one of our legitimate members somehow misses the "no selling" rule and posts something, normally we'll take it down and give them a polite warning about it. We're not complete and total hardasses, after all. But this one had never posted before, and didn't try to post anything else. As soon as he registered, he went straight into that thread and tried to post. Obviously he signed up for the sole purpose of promoting his product.

A day or two later, I did see him trying to log back in, I guess to see if we had a change of heart. When it comes to spammers, we have no heart.

[Mr Hero]

Am I reading correctly? It sounds like the spammer was trying to post right her on Customers Suck, with his spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam, but poor meanie mods cockblocked him. Thank you for your vigilance and for the free entertainment because of this bozo!

[roxtar]

another forum I'm on sometimes keeps the spammers like that around so we can mess with them.
users will find their real names and accounts from other sites and just generally harass them until they leave of their own accord.

[thatcrazyredhead]

It's the use of "we" that gives it away for me.

[Aragarthiel]

Even if it wasn't spam, it was unnecessary advertising, which is frowned upon on most sites. He should have known better.

[sirwired]

Good riddance... I'd be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and believe he does not litter the internet by putting this stuff in every vaguely-related place, but that still doesn't change the fact that this non-commercial board isn't the place for it. I don't have any clue why he thought you'd change this policy simply because he's whining about it.

[MadMike]

Well, it probably wasn't the first time I pissed off a spammer, and it probably wasn't the last. But it's one of the few times I got to hear the spammer bitch about it.

One of our members had posted a thread about getting scammed by a customer. One night, I was going through the posts that were waiting for approval, and I found the following several posts into that thread:

We're very sorry you had to experience that, but the reality is that if you deal with internet payments that statistically about a third of all the fraud is friendly fraud or cyber shoplifting that you experienced.

Going forward take a look at (site redacted) as we currently have the only solution that can help fight these types of fraudsters. Take a look at the video too on the site.

It's time honest merchants such as yourself fight back, and not get ripped off.

I checked the database to see if he was on the list as a spammer, and came up empty. However, this was clearly spam, so I trashed the post and banned the user.

The following afternoon, I saw him log back in and try to go straight back into the thread. I had a feeling he was going to throw a fit about being banned, and I wasn't disappointed. A few minutes later, this came via the "Contact us" link:

we've been banned because of spamming reasons. Really? The guy clearly got screwed, and this happens A LOT! What we're offering is NEW, no one else in the world is offering this, and these guys don't even know we exist. It's an injustice for hard working people and merchants to keep losing money to customers who are simply stealing from them. If anything this guy should know that he can in fact prevent this from happening to him or others in the future.

So, if you feel we're spamming so be it, as if you do do a google search you will see that it's very rare for us to post anywhere at all, but in this case it was VERY relevant.

Spamming is something we don't do, but how else would you convey this is what you need to do from now on without indicating the URL to go to? If you have an answer for that we're all ears.

Interestingly enough, I did some Google searches, on the user name, the domain, even a few phrases from the post, and found nothing that indicated that he had done this before. Although maybe he had PM-spammed users on other boards, but was unable to do that on ours, and ended up trying to post.

There were a few things we could have replied back with (i.e. "Not our problem", "Read the forum rules", "Fuck off", etc.), but the consensus was that this one wasn't even worth wasting an email from a disposable address on.