too much spam in forums

I'm sick of seeing spam threads in forums.

Some of the forums have rules like requiring users have 500 posts before people can create a topic, but it's just a rule to follow and no built in features prevent this from happening. What ends up happening is mods lock those threads, whether they're spam or just people creating threads without the 500 post requirement, but they still pop up, and do frequently.

How about saving mods the trouble, and just have a feature that prevents people from creating new topics on the main boards (i.e. System Wars, Off-Topic, General Game Discussion, Sony, MS, Nintendo, etc) if they don't have the required 500 posts demanded. This should prevent those fake accounts from popping up and spamming with topic creation.

That's probably not a good idea for the game specific forums just because new users might create GS accounts to create topics and ask questions about games. However, this feature should be there for the main forums.

I'm sorry that spam has become such a problem. We're currently looking into adding more volunteer moderators to the GameSpot team. If this is something that you're interested or if you know of someone who might be interested in joining the team, please feel free to PM me.

Also, you're always welcome to contact the moderators when you notice an influx of spam threads being created.

I think the main reason there's so much spam here is that the boards move so slow. If staff were to make the boards more appealing, they'd get more posts on the site and thus, there'd be less spam.

Do you have suggestions for that?

Personally there are 2 main things that kind of discourages me from posting more. First, there's no way to keep track of what threads we posted in, we really need that icon back. And second, the "last read post" button should come back as well, it makes things much easier here.

@harry_james_pot: I went ahead and created a poll for that very topic just now based on your suggestion. Thanks for the feedback. As far as the spam goes. I'm aware that this is yet another insufferable plage that the forums users suffer from. I've pestered the development team for tools that should help with this problem, but I have no ETA on when such tool will be made available. In the meantime. Please feel free to continue reporting it when you see it.

That's great. :) When the new site launched it was one of the major things people were complaining about.

There was a ton of spam even under the old site. I witnessed the spam with my own eyes. Especially during the last couple of weeks of the old site.It got really bad then to. I don't think increasing site activity will fix it much, but I do think the site needs more activity.

I don't think your suggestion will actually work. It's a good idea, but I have a feeling it may actually hurt those forums more than help them. The 500 post rule works well for SW even with it flaws, since SW is still pretty active but for the less active boards it may actually the activity on those boards(It will hurt the new users which will most likely have post counts below 500 that are actually interested in posting in these boards) One pro of your idea is that it will stop the spambots.

@super600:

Well, that's what I tried to say to some extent, it would work good for System Wars, maybe even OT, but for say less traffic boards than yeah it's probably not a good idea.

Are you saying then such a countermeasure can't be implemented board specifically?

A requirement specific to that board will have to implemented, but I still think any requirement will still hurt the less active boards. It;s better to increase the strength of the site's account creation security mechanisms then try to build requirements into every single board to stop the spam.Better tools can also be used to stop the spam.