Countermeasures? Do you have an intern stand in the doorway and throw shredded tinfoil up in the air to confuse the SPAMmers?

Nah, they weave it into special cosies for the servers...

Force of habit. Previous work experience, so some of the lingo kind of sticks with me. And no making fun of shedded tinfoil. You don't know how well it works on spammers until you try! My idea is to clog their internet tubes with a bunch of shredded tinfoil, and when they try to post spam...their tubes are blocked!

Foolproof!

The term is entirely accurate, Matt :-) I appreciate people who use appropriate language.

If you think a member is causing problems with spam, or other unsuitable activities, then just drop a PM to one of the admins (usually Randofo, as "Community Manager").

If it's a spam issue, then it's enough to entitle the PM "Spammer" and include the user's name (eg "www.instructables.com/member/SPAMMER").  Otherwise, a brief description of the problem, and a link to the page with the problem comments, would be useful.

You can do that, but it's an extra step that's really not needed. If you flag it, in most every case, it should be gone within the day.

I suppose if it's of great importance to get rid of it as quickly as possible you can pm someone, but we're checking flagged items about as often as we check our mailbox.

I didn't mean PM about each piece of spam, but I have come across a number of accounts recently where a bunch of spam posts and instructables have been posted - for instance, there was an account that posted adverts for fake tanning cream every couple of days - and it's easier to highlight the account than to trawl through their posts.

True.

Great idea

:-) No problem! It's quite annoying, I know -- and more so when one of these low-paid keyboard slaves creates multiple forum topics as well. On the upside, when someone on the Community Team notices and flags, the postings disappear right away.

That's been discussed many times and is against site policy. It should be easy to find the forum topics (just search for "delete comments").

The community team consists of staff and a small group of members who do things like apply feature flags, can "delete" (flag and make invisible) comments, and do judging on contests.