Anti-spam thought...
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How about quarantining first posts for review by Tauck folks before letting a new user’s comments post?
No coincidence that the totally irrelevant/inappropriate posts are always their first (and, presumably being black-listed, their last) post.
No coincidence that the totally irrelevant/inappropriate posts are always their first (and, presumably being black-listed, their last) post.
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I'm always amused that the perps seem impervious to the scorn and derision some of us throw back at them. They never seem to bother about defending their wonderful ideas. And some perps obviously use public forums as places to practice their English as a second (third, fourth, fifth) language. I often wonder if such posts are examples of homework .... write this a hundred times. This is just a new age kind of blackboard. Sometimes it's amusing to play back, if they are not actually spamming. Trouble is, they are often not genuine either. However, I have discovered that in this age of adult illiteracy and general ignorance that when you combine those traits with text speak it is often hard to tell the difference between those posts and spam. One seems as illiterate as the other. Yet, bless their hearts, travel is a wonderful educator and they have to start somewhere. How are they ever going to learn about the real world outside their front gate unless someone answers their first, faulting question? Bless their poor dear hearts, you just have to hope they have the wit to see and hear the answers.
Cheers,
Jan
I agree that this isn't their main mission, but as you note, they are already spending the time to clean things up after the fact.
Most blog/forum software has the capability to delay immediate posts by new members. Utilizing such a feature would 1) group the messages most likely to need review in one place, and 2) remove them before they are ever posted which would disincentivize those doing this.
As it stands right now, they either need to review all posts and/or be tipped off by us ("Report Abusive") to an inappropriate post. And, as Tauck employees working something resembling normal hours, this doesn't happen on weekends. I expect the "Security Services" thread to disappear tomorrow (Monday).
If the software is sophisticated enough, they might recruit some very active posters (which implies folks who are actively monitoring the board) as volunteer moderators and, if they mark a message as abusive, hide it until reviewed by Tauck staff.
An earlier comment in another thread relating to this problem suggested that only those who've taken a Tauck tour should be able to post. I don't think that's a good idea as this forum can be a great source of information for those first considering traveling with Tauck.
Also agree that only allowing people who have booked a journey would not work.
My opinion, such a small number of Tauck customers use this forum, it is not worth Tauck spending the money to make improvements at this point.
Like Jan said, that's a good idea, but it has some definite drawbacks. Most prominently, you folks wouldn't be able to carry on a real conversation without constant monitoring by a human being here in the office to approve every post as it came in. I think that would definitely be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. As it is, annoying as they are when they do come in, we don't get spammers too often, and when we do, we delete their posts and block them as soon as we can.
Also, probably the best way to report spam to us is to email esupport@tauck.com -- we check that email address multiple times a day during the week, and it guarantees we'll see it an absolute minimum of time after the email comes in. Oh, and I've already taken care of the security services post.
Thanks for all the interest in the forums, everybody!
-Tim
PS: British, remember that person you mentioned who was just "practicing second language," as you put it, and I said how even if their posts were a bit odd, they hadn't broken any rules at that point? They posted undeniable spam a few days later for a foreign tour operator. So, ultimately, we were both right in that case!
Unfortunately, these days, there are forces of evil out there who could disrupt the forums a lot worse than the spammers. By the way, anyone need forged travel or other official documents?
Tim,
Perhaps you misunderstood. I was NOT suggesting that every post be quarantined for review. Just the first post of newly registered users. As you know from cleaning up the aftermath, the annoying, inappropriate posts are always from a user as their first post (or sometimes posts in multiple threads). If they didn't see their post go live immediately (or ever, after review), they'd likely go elsewhere.
Sending an email to you every time we see an inappropriate post takes a fair amount of effort. What does the "Report Abusive" feature do? I assumed that alerts you in a much quicker and easier manner than creating an email and pasting a link. True?
Alan's suggestion about validating the emails is what most public sites have gone to for this very reason. The effort to create a burner email address, register on a site, receive and reply to the validation email and then make their spam post is more effort than most of these spammers would likely go to. It's no coincidence that on these other forums, you don't see spam (just poor comments by real members...but that's life).
Ahh, I definitely did misunderstand that. That's a very good idea! I will look into if something like that is possible -- and if not, we are planning to upgrade the forums later in 2015, as I think I've mentioned before, so it may be possible in the new version.
Thanks for the suggestion!
-Tim
Any progress on spam filtering?
I am again struck by how effective it would be for Tauck to implement a standard Internet forum practice of quarantining the first posts of brand new users. Today we have another seven first posts by someone offering fake documents (they have clearly misjudged this forum!) which makes the recent post list for the forum worthless since it bumps everything down.
Please learn a lesson from the other major travel forums (FlyerTalk, CruiseCritic, etc.) where this never happens. They quarantine first posts (only) for real-human review so this isn't a major effort.
The Tauck forums are a hugely valuable resource for past, present and future travelers which is diminished by the inability to block these annoying posts...which frequently happen on weekends and therefore aren't dealt with until Monday...they know what they are doing.
Allen R.