PM spam

Have had a message from angievere about unsolicited pm offering a natural cure from a new user dennig17. Looks like they've messaged a few people. Am at work so have not looked into it further.

Teresa

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Just looked, and indeed it seems to be a quite obvious spam attempt. They've made no posts on the board itself.

I've suspended the account; reason: ""Abusing the PM facility"". Fortunately, this is covered by the T&Cs.

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Thanks Steve,

Are they made aware of this automatically when banned/suspended and what is the difference?

Or is a message sent separately?

I thought it only fair to let angievere know we were looking into it and not likely to be doing it again. A few others had messages too, do they get informed action has been taken?

Apologies if I am asking a gazillion questions

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In the past we haven't informed anyone who hasn't made a complaint about any action we've taken, but telling Angeline is fine since she was the one who brought it to our attention.

When you suspend someone the board asks you to give a reason for the suspension. The message that you leave here is displayed to the user the next time they try to log in.

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More unsolicited PMs, don't know if this has come up before, from a longstanding favourite member Marian Slee about Vitamin A.

Also Pandya seems to have been busy telling people that homeopathy can mean not needing medication.

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Marian Slee has sent a lot of PMs advertising her book, which is a T&C breach. Considering her sole purpose here has been to promote that book, I've opted to suspend her account for spam messages and commercial advertising. She has posted more than three messages adverising the book, so she should have racked up her third warning some time ago.

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Thanks Steve,

Is this something I can start doing if a clear cut case as a newbie mod?

So she's had warnings before or you mean she should have?

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She should've had - unless someone reports a PM, or we have a very suspect user, I never check PMs. However, Asthma UK agreed ages ago that commercial advertising is an instant suspension, because if we just delete the advert without suspending the account they can just log on and post it again.

I sent a possible guide to moderating to Webed for him to look at, but I haven't heard from him. I'll prod him again, but if he doesn't reply soon I may well just email it to you anyway!

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Thanks Steve for clarification re PMs and the mod guide mention.