Our review boards appear to have become the target of some spammers.

Certain words in reviews will now cause the review to fail to post. Hopefully not too many genuine mud reviews contain 'viagra' 'cialis' etc. This is a quick fix until I can put in place something more elaborate.

Hopefully you can do that, or it will follow the same pattern as the e-mail spam, where the spammers have started to misspell their irritating products to avoid the filters most users have in place.

So now they spell it VlAGRA (with an L) or V*I*A*G*R*A or embed it in an image.

It's amazing how anyone could think that sleazy methods like that would make people want to buy their product. It rather has the effect of most sensible people getting in a bad mood every time they see that name.

Perhaps the reviews could be require you to first log on to your TMS account? If you want people to have the opportunity to remain anonymous, you could do so via a check-box.

I think requiring a login of some form would cut down on a lot of the negative behaviors associated with reviews. We've always allowed and encouraged player feedback through the reviews section, but every once in a while we do get either spam or off-topic stuff. A little accountability would go a long way.

Synozeer: It might also be useful for you to grant a person or two the ability to delete (or just hide) reviews, to help you keep the signal-to-noise level higher. (Presumably, they'd be discouraged or forbidden from touching reviews of their own MUDs, to downplay conflicts of interest.)

While we're at it (sprucing up the review system) -

Currently, lots of people who aren't site contributors put up reviews. I think it's great, however I would *really* like to have some manner of "etiquette list" provided for all reviewers.

There are several games where reviewers will post negative things, and then get countered by people who want to discuss the negative points. They do it in the review section, rather than here in the forum, which bumps their game to the top of the reviews list for the sole purpose of having a conversation with a single reviewer.

I find that more annoying than the spam. If I want to see a discussion I'll come to the discussion forum. The reviews section is not a place for discussions, but most of the people who need to know that, don't read the forums, and therefore won't know that it's considered impolite.

My suggestion is - when someone tries to post a review, OR on any game's given "reviews list," a single paragraph be provided to spell out specifically what the reviews section is for and ask the posters to kindly comply with the etiquette.

If that doesn't help (I like to think the best of people, and assume that most "violators of etiquette" simply aren't educated about this matter), then more significant code could be implemented. Such as how they do it on TMC, giving people a "respond to review" link. That way only the review itself would determine the game's placement on the review list, and responses would have no impact on that, yet at the same time, people would be able to respond without being impolite.

Well... why not just have the reviews go into a forum panel, restricted to registered users, and search on those in order to get a list of reviews for the game? They could be listed as they are now, as a separate display from the forum listing on voting pages. Responses to negative reviews can be in the same thread instead of posing as reviews.. and by restricting to registered users, at least you'll know who's posting reviews for ViagraMUD.

I doubt he will do much if anything of what is suggested here.

Cheers for what you do do though syn.

I think the main problem with that is that you'd get a lot of registers from spambots. I mean, you might be able to filter it by implementing a system that allowed you to approve registrations, but you'd get so many spam-bot registrations eventually it'd just be too much work.

Seems yet another review for the mud "Battletech - The Frontier Lands" was hit by one of those spammers....

So were the last two for Grendel's Revenge.

For individual cases like this, it's probably better to contact Synozeer directly. He's the only one that can remove the offending posts, and all you're doing here is calling more attention to them.