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As many of you know Map Making Assistance forum has been under attack by spam. Every recent topic you look in you'll see that people who do not completely understand the problems of the topic are replying with mostly useless and sometimes completely irrelevent information.

This is a growing problem and warning those who post does not seem to be enough. They just simply don't understand they are wrong. I present to you all a solution to this problem.

Restricted Reply!

The first way I thought of doing this was only allowing certain members of SEN to reply to the MMA forum. But this may bring controversy as people are viewed as "elite" in mapping skill compared to others. This could completely eliminate all spam in the MMA forum.

Therefore one better way would be to take away replying privileges in the MMA forum if they post spam or irrelevent information. This would greatly reduce the amount of spam in the MMA forum.

Might this slow the flow of answers?
Yes it will but would you rather have 1 good answer within a day or 20 conflicting answers within an hour?

Replying in MMA definitely needs restricted access. There is just way too much crap being posted.
So, whitelist (only people on the list can reply), or blacklist (everyone except the people on the list can reply)?
I'm leaning toward white.

I just that thought of something...
With whitelisting, you really don't get the chance to prove you know what you are talking about if you never have the ability. How would you make this list without that chance?

Since when has SEN been a democracy?

The problem is that questions asked often vary in difficulty, so blacklisting or whitelisting would only benefit the hardest questions that people could spam in -- and not the majority of easier questions.

Easy things would be "how do I move a location", Medium things maybe "how do mobile grids work", and Hard definitely "in what order to triggers execute" where even (U) members are having trouble.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to add a function to "promote" the best quality posts so they stand out while the spammy ones will be easier to ignore.

Just look at what metafilter does.

Now that I think about it, a blacklist probably would be better.
Many of the spam posts come from a few key people. No reason to block everyone just because of them.

High Templar forum?

And who decided what answers are good, the members that don't know what they are talking about, or the mods that already have too much to do?

I'd just keep warning and fining them. Eventually they'll learn not to post bad info and check what they're saying before they post. If you banned a user and they came back, they'd probably be unchanged.

The problem is they don't.

Ten of the same offenses gives an obvious impression that they won't learn. Then their ass gets suspended and eventually, banned.

Chances are they'd stop after suspension. If not, then blacklist.

Actually, I think suspension has a higher chance of simply forcing the person to do a workaround than actually learning from mistakes.


It shouldn't overwhelm the staff too much, elites are definitely up to the task and maybe regulars too.

They're alot of regulars that just spammed their way up though. People who try that for elite are usually banend before they come close.