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Old 5th June 2008
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jggimi jggimi is offline
More noise than signal
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
Posts: 7,977
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I used to be an active moderator at a very large vbb forum for digital video. It's a forum with about 140,000 members, 3 admins, and about 40-50 moderators.

That forum has an extremely strict rules set. It also has a customized vbb to enable an official warnings from moderators -- and a system to automatically suspend users who receive 3 warnings within a 30-day period. In addition, there's a five-day waiting period before new users can post. That structure was put in place to promote searching for answers and reading FAQs and HowTos, and for that ... it works well. But it doesn't prevent spam. Spam is an ongoing, never ending problem.

Here's a link to their rules and the "three strikes" system, just to give you a feel for how strict some can be. Note: that forum began in October 2001 with no rules at all. Each and every rule, and system of control, was put in place due to horrid problems. I recall the initial implementation of the waiting period. Oh-my. 3 days wasn't enough to stop the people who'd never heard of Google or couldn't find the search button. We had to move it to 5 days.

http://forum.doom9.org/forum-rules.htm
http://forum.doom9.org/sanctions.htm
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