I'm going to make this a sticky in this forum, because I think it's important for new people to the welcome wagon to know
As I'm sure you can see, several users regularly (or irregularly, either is fine!) help us look for spam accounts among our new users.
These are accounts created by bots (aka - not actual people) which eventually, if they manage to activate themselves (they very rarely get to that point) will post spam messages on the board.
We get spam about a lot of things, including for example, pharmaceutical advertisements, things for "cheap cigarettes", stuff about poker or online gambling, and a lot that have to do with pornography.
If you choose to look in the memberlist, you might see some pretty nasty things listed in the profiles of some of these spam-bots. While a lot of them are fairly harmless (for example, just say "porn") others can be very disturbing even just to read the links etc. in the profiles.
This is a reminder that if you're in a bad place with regard to sexual, or SA issues, helping us out with spam could potentially be "triggering" for you.
It's also possible that some of the other spam things that we see could be triggering for things such as ED, OD, SU, SI etc.
If you're in a bad place, please, put yourself first. We do a pretty good job of catching the spammers, and it's not necessary that you help us, though it's always appreciated
Another important thing to remember is that it's not a good idea to click on any of the links that you see in spammers' profiles. These could pop up with some really nasty things (including images or videos) AND they could be trying to put spyware on your computer. All in all, it's just not worth it. Don't click, and if you're not sure if it's a spammer, don't worry about going to those links to find out! Like I said earlier, we're pretty good at catching them, and if worst comes to worst, we'll just leave an account for a while if we're really unsure about it.
I hope that all makes sense, and if you've got any questions, please don't hesitate to ask!
Thanks for all your help, the whole staff really appreciates the work that people put in here
prox. [am I paranoid?]
