SANParks.org Forums

With the current testing to see if there are moderators around on Easterday by spammers, I also see many questions from normal members, mostly about what to do.

So in a nutshell:
Report the post by hitting the exclamationmark in the lower righthandcorner of the post.
Do not react to the spammer with angry posts, first of all the spammer will not bother to read them, and secondly the normal rules still do apply!

The reporting will cause a large red exclamatuon mark to appear next to the topic which is hard to miss for any moderator.

Most of the times spammers make new topics, quite handy for us as it cleans easily.
If not, and in a topic you are busily discussing something, just report and ignore. That way we do not need to edit or split, just delete the post.

You do not need to PM a moderator, unless it's obvious that he/she missed it as it went to page 2 of 'Latest posts' or 'Active topics'.

There is a difference between Admins, Moderators and Assistent Moderators which you may need to know.

Admins can do anything on the forums, they are the owners.

Moderators can delete, split etc, in all forums, and ban members. (Even Admins, but somehow I'm not even going to try that one! ) The members meant here are spammers, not regular members, that banning is done by Admin.

Assistent Moderators have specific forum(s) they administer, look at the names next to the forumtitles. They can not ban, nor can they remove spam from forums other than their 'own'.

So in short, report & ignore, and hope someone with the proper rights picks it up quickly. We usually do.

Never ever try one of the links advertised, chances are very high your computer will be attacked by worms, virusses etc, and your banking may suddenly be quite different....!
Buying stuff advertised is throwing good money away, at best you'll be posted a nice brick, not a phone or such.

Please note a few things, which are related to the recent spamwave:

As stated in the rules, links to commercial sites are not allowed!

Happily spammers never read the rules as they will trod on all of them anyways, so they fill in their URL field, making it very easy for us to spot them. Silly people!
We have banned spammers before they even posted, based on the URL's posted in their profile.

Now if you suddenly pop onto the forum, with a link to a commercial site present, and ask a question, we start to doubt, and will move your post offtopic, with a friendly PM asking to remove the URL.
If it's removed we're good friends, and move the topic back. If not we must assume spamming, and we're less good friends unfortunately.

Now I know several people look in the memberslist to see who joined, and look at the websites advertised.
Not a good idea!
We've found quite a few sites bombarding your computer with virusses and such, so unless you're sure your computer is a fortress of note, all software up-to-date, don't even try the members that are among the last say 150 to register!

Why are they still there you wonder?
Until they post we can only ban the username. So all the spammer needs to do is create a new one. Like mopping the floor with the tap still open.
So we wait till they are online, grab their IP address, and ban that! It's harder to get a new one...
In the end they'll all get banned.

Did you recently update your software? Ran Windows Update and such?