ATTN Admins

[Moderator 3]

If you can find this among the spam, when you are - I hope - visiting HOWtown, here's what I want as a moderator:

1. the mod tools at the bottom, by the "mark all" selection. I'll forget I have to grab the tools first and scroll down to the bottom to mark all, but when I get there, the tools are not there, of course, so I have to scroll back to the top, get the tools, scroll back to the bottom to mark all, select "delete", confirm "yes", "go back to previous page" and start over again, same routine. About 70% of the time I forget to grab the tools first, so there is an extra step in an already "too many steps" process.

2. something that allows us to also "ban all posts by this user" when we ban a spammer, or vice versa, allows us to select "ban this user" when we are deleting pages of his posts. Banning a spammer involves about 4 clicks, too, so if there was a way to save some steps there, it would help.

3. do spammers do a test to see if there is something in place that would block them from filling the place with spam? I see blank no-topic threads by spammers but I don't bother to open them and see if they are truly blank, but it seems like they all do it. Please try to find something that is more like the old forum, where it wasn't as easy for spammers to get in.

4. Recruit more moderators. I think we have two active moderators now? and one that I gave my login info to who has a little more time to kick out scum than I do. You probably can think of more people who used to love the forum who might want to help out for old time's sake before you give up the ghost.

4. I know you guys have "real" jobs and I suspect that moderating the forum is at the bottom of the list because it's a free service, but if it isn't important enough to you to make it work better, please just take it down so we don't have to keep going through worthless motions.<-- I think that would be a disservice to the broader design community because, I don't care how "good" Facebook might be, it's not a forum where we can talk about things in detail and learn from each other - there are far more novice to intermediate designers than there are expert designers, and this forum used to be a great resource for designers. I don't know how a forum relates to the big picture as far as magazine sales go, but...

a. advertisers are not going to give a flip about the forum soon for obvious reasons.
b. old-timers are not going to come back if they keep seeing there is nothing worth coming back to. But they love to bitch about it on Facebook after they give it a try.
c. Newbs are not going to come back if the first time they come they see nothing but worthless crap.

I dumped some pages of crap, but I have to go now.

[icu]

Can we get on this? The board is currently overrun with sophisticated spam, the kind that only humans can deal with by broad deletion and user blocking. Having moderators is pointless unless they have the right powers.