Reporting Private Message Spam and Other Issues: A Reminder for Members

[Moonbear]

One of the mentors received spam by private message today. This raised the issue that if someone sends spam in this way, since we don't snoop into other people's PMs, the mentors usually would have no way to know this without being told. There is also no "report" bad post button on PMs, so in case there is any confusion on this, members are always encouraged to notify a mentor if they should receive something problematic by PM (forwarding a copy of the offending message is helpful for us to determine the action that needs to be taken), especially if you receive spam. We make every attempt to keep this site free of spammers, so will ban them immediately if you let us know they've found a sneaky way around our quick detection.

Also, this would apply to any other problematic issues in PMs (someone insulting or harrassing you, for example).

Since today we had a case where only one mentor somehow made it to the spammer's PM list, it's possible (likely) others have been spammed by PM and we never knew it happened because it was just deleted and ignored. Please, inform us if this happens.

 

[cristo]

I received a spam PM yesterday; I presume it was from the same person as they've subsequently been banned. I wasn't really too sure what to do about it. I had a look on the staff list and saw that no mentors were online at that time and then guess I must have forgotten about it. In future if this happens and there are no mentors online what should I do-- forward it to a mentor at random?

 

[Evo]

I received a spam PM yesterday; I presume it was from the same person as they've subsequently been banned. I wasn't really too sure what to do about it. I had a look on the staff list and saw that no mentors were online at that time and then guess I must have forgotten about it. In future if this happens and there are no mentors online what should I do-- forward it to a mentor at random?

Yes, you can send it to a mentor that you see active a lot.

 

[Chronos]

I just delete it. Not that I've received much spam on PF. The filters appear to be effective. I don't have difficulty spotting the stuff and would regret missing an honest message due to overly aggressive filtering.