Still letting the taggers win?

[Phil Barila]

Not enough team left at SlickEdit to clean up after the vandals?

[chrisant]

Cleaning up is a costly strategy that only gets more and more costly as time goes on.  It's both more effective and less costly to turn on moderation for new members and require a few on-topic meaningful posts before turning off moderation.

I'm irritated by the spamming as well, but getting belligerent about it towards the SlickEdit team in the user community forum isn't helping the situation.  Please consider sending private emails with constructive feedback or maybe even offers to help with moderation.

For example, imagine if there were a group of Community MVPs able to help moderate posts from new users.  Community MVPs could see pending posts and click "approve" if the post meets basic forum criteria, thus the SlickEdit team would only need to periodically approve posts the MVPs missed, and delete posts the MVPs rightly refrained from approving.  New moderated members could be automatically promoted to full community members after X approved posts, or by MVPs or SlickEdit team members explicitly promoting them.

[Phil Barila]

@chrisant, by that logic, you shouldn't bother painting over it the next time some tagger scrawls his "art" on your abode.
I agree that first-time moderation sounds like an excellent mitigation step.

[chrisant]

@chrisant, by that logic, you shouldn't bother painting over it the next time some tagger scrawls his "art" on your abode.

LOL.  By that logic, you shouldn't bother fixing leaky pipes in the ceiling, just keep painting over the water stains.

I'm not saying to ignore cleanup.  I'm saying focusing primarily on cleanup misses the bigger picture and adds an uncontrolled permanent tax.