What to do when you recieve a private message...

... that is clearly spam.

A fair few of you have been fortunate enough to recieve that private message telling you to buy a certain CD, or inviting you to join a dating site or whatnot. Well, I'm taking this opportunity to ask you all to do us on the A-Team a favor. Report it.

Spamming is against the terms of service. In fact, the terms of service explicitly says:

To maintain that safe and civil environment, you agree not to upload, post, display, distribute, transmit or otherwise publish on the Site any material that:

[...]

(6) sells or promotes any products or services.

You may not use this Site while impersonating any other person or entity, to collect or use any information about other participants for any purpose, or to distribute chain letters, junk mail, "spam" solicitations, commercial advertising, or other bulk communications of any kind.

The problem we have with private messaging spam is that we don't regularly monitor private messages, and nowhere near the extent that we monitor blogs and forums. In fact, most of us don't even have the capability of seeing the content of private messages that are not addressed to us. It's really easy to block a user that spams in the forums or in various blogs, but private messages are inherently more difficult.

That's where you come in. If you recieve a message from someone, and you believe that message is spam, please use Flag Boy, and report it. Of course, the setup of the flagging page makes it more difficult to report, since we still can't access private messages, even with a correct URL. So, this is what we want you to do:

In the URL field, write "Private Message". In the comment field, paste the text of the private message.

If you don't do BOTH of these steps, we can't stop this spam from occuring. So please let us know so we can make ProU a nicer place for everyone :-).

Share this post on:

 •    •    •    •    •