Tarnicus: Assigning a person to combat spam rather than attempting to resolve or restrain the issue via code seems a bit labour intensive to me :)
IAmSinistar: It's sometimes the only solution though, at least in certain circumstances. There are posts which a human being can tell instantly are spam, but which are designed to baffle pattern recognition algorithms who do the same job.
It goes back to the conundrum of there being some things which computers can do far better than us, and some things which they are still far behind on. Maybe not as bad as the computers on
Star Trek which short out when confronted with the concept of "love", but nearly so. :)
Oh I can understand the human element being a necessary overseer. What would the downsides be of implementing a system on the forums where a new thread can only be made every x amount of minutes, where x = the velocity of an unladen swallow?
Speaking of AI, consciousness and "humanity", I'd highly recommend the movie
Chappie. Thea and I saw it yesterday and loved it :) It is written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, the guy who wrote and directed District 9.
"Humanity" has reached an all-time high when a story about AI and consciousness provokes intense discussion about...
Hugh Jackman's haircut toxicTom: *snip*
That's why, when the big spam wave hit, I wrote some scripts/bookmarklets that allowed for mass reporting the spam threads (and bringing the browser to a crawl ;-)). They are buried somewhere in the "We are under attack"-thread.
Ah I was going to ask if someone had done that. Good job old chap! :)
Edited for early morning incoherence :P