Why is WP suddenly going to hell ?

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Wrong Planet now looks like a poorly defended and failing site. Spam, ads and Trolls have overrun the site.

What happened?

I thought this was supposed to be an upgrade, an improvement.

Is the Admin/Mod team aware of the problem?

What are you doing about it?

Try reporting what you see with the "Report" button, instead of a random post of your own.

WP is a popular website. I'm not at all surprised that it's attracted spammers, and trolls have always been part of the membership.

I am not wasting my time chasing spammers. The report button turned out to be a placebo anyway last time I used it.

I just want to know what Alex is doing about it.

Then why don't you ask HIM?

We've always had trolls and spam.

We deal with it when it happens. If you have any brilliant solutions as to how to keep them from coming on the site in the first place, I'm all ears.

Speaking of spam....more Russian spam just found its way onto the forum.

It's in the general autism discussion section... I just reported the living Hell out of it though.

1) I can't ask him direct. I have tried. He doesn't answer. So I try this way.
2) We did not have anywhere close to this level of Spam invasion on the old site. So something is wrong with the set up/spam filtering here.

If you want it to avoid losing members you had best fix this now, not next month or three. Nothing turns people off faster then a spammy site. What it says to people is the site isn't defended or maintained and might have virtual cooties.

I direct this to Developer/Owner Alex because past experience indicates our moderators, although committed and hard working are powerless to make any changes.

Sin?

When spam, trolls et al reach a critical mass, people get tired of reporting it on a case by case basis and just tune out or ship out. Toy Soldier has a point I think, that could do with a bit of creative brainstorming at administrator level, and maybe troll policy needs revisiting too - it seems a lot looser than it used to be, they hang around much longer.

The adds appearing to show up within posts is annoying...that I would agree with and hopefully maybe they can change/fix that. However I have not noticed it being over-run by trolls, I have seen a couple troll posts and spam posts but not really anymore than I've seen before the upgrade....I think those are impossible to entirely eliminate but you can always report the spam and any trolling that breaks site rules(though not sure all things people would consider trolling actually would break the rules).

Also doesn't look too bad to me, guess kinda plain being all white and what not but not a terrible format or look.

There may be some differences in what words mean to people. To me advertisements and other mass solicitations to buy or join things are Spam.

Those things appearing in quantity is new and swiftly can degrade a site. It was mentioned this site is popular, and I would like to see it kept that way.

I really only added mentioning Trolls because of a few recent incidents. One was a recent multiple post that was blatantly racist and which was not removed quickly. Are our Moderators still not trusted with full banning tools? If an Admin made me have to chase each spam or troll post down and manually delete it, only to have to do it again when the Troll joins with a new ID, I would quit.

The issue of Trolls as it pertains to what standards are being upheld on Wrong Planet is a separate issue and more subjective. But again I see a slippage. Is it because of upheaval in the Moderator position or is the newly installed 'report' button not working or used? I recently reported an obvious violation of personal attack rules with the report button. Nothing happened as far as I can tell. The posts remained, and there was no intervention. Did anyone even see the report?

So yes, its going south quickly.