OK, everyone, heads up!

We're still getting 3-6 spammer registrations a day and while we're doing a pretty good job of sussing them out and getting rid of them, every now and again, one slips past us and manages to get a post onto the forum.

We had one such instance, about 45 minutes ago. A spammer (since removed) placed a spam post on the forum at 7:42 PM EDT. At 7:43 PM, I already had a Reported Post e-mail in my Inbox, warning me of the post.

A 1 minute span of time.

I stopped the work I was doing on another site, logged in here and removed the post at 7:45 PM. And at 7:54 PM, I had a Private Message from another member, warning me about the post I had removed 9 minutes earlier.

Ladies and gentlemen, the forum staff are (believe it or not) doing their dead-level best to keep this forum upright and on an even keel. Our founder has made wise decisions in selection of staff members, as we can overlap several time zones and provide more hours of daily coverage. We have one Moderator in Norway and one in British Columbia, so there are not many hours out of the day that the forum is not being covered.

But the fact remains that each one of us actually do have other interests and obligations that require us to be away from the computer a few hours each day. (Well, the other staff members do, anyway. Note my avatar. )

Please note there are two small modifications to the forum rules and guidelines, listed below and with the changes highlighted in red -

Adult/Sexually Explicit Material and Commercial Promotion

Links to adult content (pornography and the like), pages with links to adult content, near-adult content (including model, lingerie, and swimsuit sites), or messages describing anything against the law will be removed as soon as possible. Members posting this material will be warned. Any discussion of these topics is off limits. Please refrain from sexually explicit posts of any kind.

Additionally, this forum is moderated for foul language and commercialized, promotional posts. The X Marks Forum Staff will decide what is considered foul, vulgar or improper.

Posts containing inappropriate material will lead to a warning.This is and will remain a family-friendly forum.

Solicitation & Spam

If you are an active member of this forum, feel free to list personal items for sale. Any spam posts will be deleted without notice. The X Marks Forum Staff will make decisions on what is spam and what isn't. If your first and only post is a post to sell stuff and you have not introduced yourself to the forum, the post may be edited or deleted.

Without exception, this area is provided for forum members to sell personal items and not to be used by any business or commercial concern.

The forum staff make concerted effort to provide diligent oversight of the forum posts, but the fact remains that we cannot always be available. While we certainly like to see forum members taking an active part in the continued health of this forum community, we ask that no contact be made with forum staff until spam posts have remained on the forum at least 6 hours. We also request that forum members resist the urge to post replies to spam posts.

In the first instance, we are merely drawing attention to the fact that we will remove inappropriate posts, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

In the second instance, we ask that you allow the staff members a minimum of 6 hours, before reporting problem posts to us. We further request that you put the urge to respond to spammers behind you. There's simply no need to respond to the bampots and the entire thread is going to get binned anyway, so just ignore the spam. We'll get it taken care of within the 6 hour time frame and if you see that we haven't, then fire us off a messsage to point us in the right direction.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this. We appreciate having forum members that are as interested in a healthy forum as we are.

And now, I'm back to modifying .php files on another site...