I've witnessed 10 or so mass spamming on the warlight forum during my time at warlight. During the mass spamming, 3 or more pages of spam are there, just waiting to be deleted by the mods, but I ask, why? Two mass spamming attacks have occurred in the past two days, so I think it's time to get it under control:

Have a CAPATCHA for players to solve every time they create a thread. It's not like no other forum uses this, it's very common. Have more moderators, and give them the tools needed to do what needs to be done.

Players like "Sqiggles" and "Karl Goldberg" and "SirSalty" contribute absolutely zero value to the community, and are probably responsible for mass spamming attacks, so why keep them? Why aren't the moderators permanently banning him every time you see evidence that it is him? They've all been banned at-least 5 times before, so why not completely shut them down? It's not like you lose any revenue.

It is very easy for any player to set up a network of alts, and level them up to level 5 or whatever you need to post on the forums. Level 5 players should not be posting on the general forum, but the help forum still exists:

Alternative solutions to the help forum could exist, like a "Help Mod" thing, that sends a question to the moderators and whoever answers it first creates a mail thread between those two players, and ends the "Help Mod" request.

The Warlight forum is important because a lot of players who want to see what is going on in the community use it daily, and they see all of the clutter and low-quality content, usually above and in-between the "important" stuff.

And the only spam topic that got deleted was the only one where three people were complaining about it. All the rest stay... D:<

How do you permanently ban them? They can easily use proxies to mask IPs as anonym demonstrated so just how do you identify them with absolute certainty?

Never mind the fact that the majority of forum posts are garbage and unnecessary anyways.

Mhmm. Maybe this could be sorted if a users' first post had to be approved by a moderator first? It wouldn't stop mass spamming if the first post is (disguised as) sensible and got approved, but at least it would make the spammers less tempted to spam if their topics don't show up immediately.

Banning a user is pointless. It's just an alt. They'll create another and move forward. The only real damage is that perma-banning a primary account prevents the troll from taking advantage of their higher-level account and having to start over on that process. Ultimately a trivial impact.

Tristan, requiring a first post approval would only be a short stopgap. The spammer alt has already played a few games to get to level 4 so what's really stopping them from submitting one decent post before starting spamming?

Edited 7/7/2016 15:38:09

There's always a small chance that they'd get bored waiting for the first post to be approved, I suppose.

Other than that, I've got no ideas :/

While annoying, the captcha really is the best solution. Perhaps eliminate the captcha for accounts of a certain level (since those are less likely to risk the perma-ban))

We don't really need a captcha. Those only stop some low-level bots- and if the perpetrator of the spam attack is an alt of one of the users you mentioned, it would do close to nothing.

What really needs to be done? Warlight should set a server-side timer on each user after they create a topic. The timer could last 5, 10, even 30 minutes, but until that timer is up, the user cannot create any additional topics. What legitimate user needs to be creating several consequent topics in a short time span anyways?

Edited 7/7/2016 15:44:22

@Richard Sharpe: Agreed. Level 45, something like that?

Edit
@Epicular:
Another nice idea. At least then, a spammer could only spam the same topic and would take a hell of a lot less time to remove ;)

Edited 7/7/2016 15:46:23

Many people take advantage that Fizzer lives in GMT -8. So the spam wont be solved till he wakes up.

Also we have already one part of the battle. Since we know them too well they would be denied by all clans. This stops them from proxyjacking. However im no mind reader and maybe hijacks are not to their best intrest.

I'd wager the spamming is performed by a person, not a bot. Thus a captcha (a real captcha that changes, not the static one used with the blog) would be effective at minimizing spam.

I'm pretty sure it's 8:49 for him, and Mods can also ban people and delete posts.

I agree Richard, perma-banning doesn't really work, but I said perma-ban all of his accounts :P

Capatcha is a good solution, yes. It would take a stupid person like anonym around 3 tries to solve it, so that's like a minute between posts, he'd get bored.

The level to post on the forums should be Member, or level 43, where the ladder forum is unlocked. Makes no sense to have different forums (except the help fourm) unlocked at different levels, and there is no point for it to be used if you are such a low level really.

Edited 7/7/2016 15:52:22

3-4 pages of spam quite recently:

https://s25.postimg.org/hw74zmtm7/Player_spam_pg_1.jpg

https://s25.postimg.org/7nentt5kf/Player_spam_pg_2.jpg

https://s25.postimg.org/peqa89kz3/Player_spam_pg_3.png

https://s25.postimg.org/j2b4yfhwv/Player_spam_pg_4.png

Already reported Player (https://www.warlight.net/profile?p=6171592128) and said about spam.

Edited 7/7/2016 16:10:59

@Talking Fan
More mods can fix that (Fizzer being asleep). But of course Fizzer runs the place like Darklordio runs his clan: trust no one with power.

Edited 7/7/2016 15:53:47

I'd wager the spamming is performed by a person, not a bot. Thus a captcha (a real captcha that changes, not the static one used with the blog) would be effective at minimizing spam.

This is precisely why a captcha would be relatively ineffective at stopping committed spammers. Captchas were designed to defend against bots, not people. If I wanted to fill up several pages of the forums with spam, the captcha would simply slow me down a bit between each topic.

Although it could actually be effective against anonym, since he probably would fail most of them.

We need a server-sided timer between topic creations, like I said above.

Edit: @Ben yes.

Edited 7/7/2016 15:58:24

Proxy is a hard to solve issue if you dive into it solo. Since everyone lives in differnt places. They would need to report suspicios activity in 3rd party WL proxy server.

Since Fizzer rules the place like a Supreme Leader sees all type of place maybe we could contribute rather than volunteer in the same power Fizzer wield.

We need to enforce server protwctablility by using more than 1 proxy as not allowed per device.

There are spam bits before , yes but not to have known of proxyjacking

Players like "Sqiggles" and "Karl Goldberg" and "SirSalty"

Well I have to defend SirSalty here actually. Ever since he returned with his newest account he didn't at all troll or spam. Really he kind of stuck as a scapegoat when there are way worse people out there.

Players like "Sqiggles" and "Karl Goldberg" and "SirSalty"

Well I have to defend SirSalty here actually. Ever since he returned with his newest account he didn't at all troll or spam. Really he kind of stuck as a scapegoat when there are way worse people out there.

I feel the same to him, as well as Tyrion. His chance of redemption was ruined because for simply existing