Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion No moderators?? edit: Yay! moderators!

Man, I just came here after getting bored of the complete sh&t show that the Steam forum has become for this game, only to find pages of threads with nothing but Call Girl spam. WTF? are there NO decent moderators any more, anywhere? it's beyond sad.

came back today and all the threads were deleted.

yay! faith in humanity restored!

There are moderators (most are volunteers), but they are people too and have to work/sleep.

Unfortunately these forums are pretty ancient and there are no automated protective systems put in place to stop thread spamming.

• The very minimum would be adding specific keywords so that these spams are automatically deleted by the system.
• Somewhat more intelligent system would be something like CAPTCHA along with internal timers to prevent a person from creating so many threads in such a short time.
• Or a system that prevents fresh accounts from creating more than 1 thread per 24 hours.

There are so many ways to combat this, but unfortunately the forum is outdated so this keeps happening and then requires manual moderation to step in, at which point it's already too late because the forum is entirely filled with these bots.

The mods are too busy locking active forums and over policing tone to worry about actually doing anything useful

Ok, this is getting annoying. The mods here are doing a great job and people like you barging in and attacking them is uncalled for.
And they are moderating here voluntarily, while having full time jobs. I like to see you doing half a good job.

Why don't you become a mod yourself?

I offered and have never heard back

That just hurts my feelings.

The volunteer mod team bans Dubai call girl spam accounts every day. That’s not an exaggeration. From the moment I get a free second at work, I’m loading up the control panel on my phone. On a bad day, I was banning 20-30 spam accounts in the span of a few hours. If just one account (out of dozens) sneaks past us, it floods a subforum. Each ban must be done manually, and we sometimes don’t know which account is spam until they post. Each moderator has to eat, sleep, and work.

If you have a problem with specific moderation actions, like locking a thread you liked, you are free to appeal in a PM if you have a strong case. Otherwise, making baseless and inflammatory accusations against the mod team is a good way to find your posts put under a microscope.

I actually feel a little bad for Zerubbabel.

He ascended to mod status right when all this call girl stuff happened. So, what should have been a joyous moment turned into an arduous and unrewarding task.

I imagine this is how the clients of those dubai call girls feel too.

For what it is worth, the moderators have my high appreciation.

don't remind me

Thanks to everyone who has given us your support. We do try our best, as Zerubbabel says, both to delete call girl spam and to keep these forums a place where everyone can feel safe and and have friendly (albeit sometimes impassioned) discussions about the game.

There is also already a thread about the recent spam attacks we’ve been facing over at https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=905266. That includes some updates on what we’ve been doing to tackle the problem, and we’ll continue to use that for any future updates.

Can we help in some way? Most of us are happy to keep something so important to us as a group safe and friendly for anybody who wants to participate.

The vast majority of folk here are already helping, just by being thoughtful, constructive and generally talking to one another like human beings Beyond that, everyone can help by politely challenging unacceptable language and bad behaviour if they feel okay doing so, de-escalating tensions where they can, and using the post report functionality to let us know of anything that they think we should take a look at.

Unfortunately, while that helps keep the forums generally friendly and safe, it doesn’t help keep spammers away, and as has been observed we’ve been under siege for the past few weeks. While steps have been taken by the Larian community team that have reduced the number of spam accounts, they’ve not been eliminated totally and even one can make a right mess. We’re assured that further action is planned to make things harder for spammers, but as been said above, these forums are running on old and clunky software, and making the required changes without breaking anything seems to be difficult.

I came back today, and this:

"The volunteer mod team bans Dubai call girl spam accounts every day. That’s not an exaggeration. "

appears entirely correct. my faith in humanity is restored.

huzzah!

Yeah our mods are well equipped to deal with the endboss Dubai escort girls

"deal with the endboss Dubai escort girls"

er, you mean the spam, right? right?

I did ... or did I?