An important announcement regarding spam posts - December 1, 2017

Howdy Everybody,

As may have been seen, especially those who frequent the Rooms of Memory Forums, there has been an aggressive onslaught of spam posts. The appearance of these posts is a nuisance and inconvenience to all involved, Forums users and Moderators alike. At the moment, the Forum Moderation team must manually ban each spam user and manually delete each spam post. This can be a painstaking and hours-long process, especially when there are hundreds - and at times thousands - of spam posts each day.

We’ve put in a request to upgrade our spam filters and automated safeguards, but while we wait for this, you may notice a continued spam presence. Those posts may also remain visible for a few hours longer than you may be used to. This spam will be removed as soon as we're able, but the Forum Mod Team also wants to make sure that we continue to focus on other important duties that include providing direct replies and assistance to our Forums users.

To aid us in this endeavor, we ask everyone to keep the Forum Rules in mind, specifically:

Do not respond to or comment on posts or discussions that break the rules. Report the post or discussion to a moderator. Contributing, even to mention that something breaks the rules, keeps that discussion visible and aggravates the problem.

Do not discuss moderator disciplinary actions. Moderators will not discuss actions and ask that you do not either. Posts that contain this information will be removed and may incur further disciplinary action.

If you see any spam posts in this forum, we ask that you simply ignore it – difficult as it may be to look past these posts. Replying to those posts or commenting on them further exacerbates the issue and is also in violation of the aforementioned rules. Repeatedly disregarding those rules and this request may result in further disciplinary action.

Regarding the security of these forums, the spam posts themselves do not pose a direct threat, since only the Forum Mods are able to post clickable links. The presence of spam posts in the Forums does not indicate a security breach and does not afford spammers any access to secure information that is stored by our company. To maintain security, do not visit any of the links in the spam posts, or contact any email addresses or phone numbers that are listed in them.

Spam exists because we must make our Forums accessible so that anyone who would like to participate here would have the ability to create an account. Unfortunately, we do not currently have an available filter that would only include legitimate users and exclude spammers from making accounts. However, as mentioned above, the spam accounts are banned and their posts removed by the Forum Moderation Team as quickly as possible.

This thread will now be locked, but do know that any spam posts you encounter will be dealt with by the Forum Moderation Team. We do see these posts, making it unnecessary to PM the Mods or email Customer Support regarding this issue.

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