can admins do something about these spammers? maybe check before approve them joining?
Report their profile too. That will at least force them to make another account.
As an owner of a different community, it’s hard to deal with spamers. There is an option where they have to approve people to join but with the size of this community, you’d spend all day going over and approving accounts. Honestly, the best thing to do is tag a MOD and report the profile. Reporting profiles gets them banned so they have to create new accounts and if more people report spam, they’ll just keep getting banned and look elsewhere because it’s not worth the time. It’s just part of large communities unfortunately.
@Kevin_Danger_Powers Hopefully that will make it difficult for them to stay on large communities since more eyes means more people will report them faster.
I cannot begin to describe to you the amount of spam we get. It’s absolutely monumental. We try to handle it as best we can, but the best thing to can do to help: if you see a comment or post that is spam, tag us for comments and report the spam post.
We have the option turned on to make sure first time posters are put in a review queue. If we see one non spam post, we usually turn on auto approve for that user. Which means if you see a spam post, it’s either a user we’ve auto approved already, or was an existing user who I don’t think those rules apply to.
Either way, we do our best to limit the spam you see and appreciate your patience and reporting.
is there anything i can do to help? other than reporting which i am doing already 
And tagging admins/mods? Other than that… I guess the only other option is to become respected in the community and get promoted to a moderator position? @ThantiK other ideas?
To be fair, the amount of spam that actually becomes public is very very small compared to what it used to be.
If you guys need more help with spam let me know but it’s honestly not that bad.
We already have the community set to need moderator approval, but the 250,000 or so “people” who joined before we implemented that change have the ability to bypass it. As it stands now, any new members who post, automatically lands in the moderator queue until elevated into “looks like a legitimate user”…status.
It’s way better than it was, but you guys are lucky…I’ve fucking had child pornography posted to this community by spammers. I seriously contemplated if I wanted to keep doing this at that point…
And basically, that’s how to get promoted to moderator here – be active, help posters in the community, come to #MRRF2018 and meet me in person, etc. Basically just show that you’re an active part of the RepRap and Open Source 3D printing community at large.
Travel expenses not compensated. All rights reserved.
We do filter through a lot. Usually, when I see one post, I look through their profile to see if it’s a repeat thing. If so, I ban them and all their recent posts.
@Griffin_Paquette Yep - posting here and getting caught in spam filter means I dive into your profile to see if you’re posting the same stuff over and over and over again. Even if every post is different, but always links to your blog, and I don’t see you ever helping out in actual posts, I generally remove if I’m in a good mood, ban if I’m not.