Spam User Reporting

[XLjedi]

What's the best way to report spam accounts? 

...such as these:  [specific examples snipped by moderator]

Maybe add a "Report User" button to the User Profile page?

 

Edited October 4, 2017 by Snark
Thanks for reporting. Best to do it privately, though, so as not to give them additional publicity.

[Geonovast]

Don't think it's necessary.  If they try to post, one of the mods will have to approve it first, which I'm sure will get them caught and banned.  If they PM you, just alert one of the mods.

[XLjedi]

They update their profile pics which puts them into the Activity streams for all to see without having to actually post or PM anyone, and they post their illicit website links to their profiles...  and some of the pics are just not appropriate for this forum.  I'll leave it to the mods as to how they would like to handle it.

[Snark]

 

What's the best way to report spam accounts?

If you see a post from a user, just report the post as per usual.

If you happen to notice the user's profile itself, just pick one of their posts and then report that.

Of course, that doesn't help in the case where they actually haven't posted anything and it's just a profile sitting there.

 

Maybe add a "Report User" button to the User Profile page?

Yes, that would be nice.  Unfortunately, Squad doesn't actually write the forum software-- it's a third-party product that they don't have much control over.  They can report bugs and make feature requests to the software vendor, of course, but Squad is just one customer among many and there's no particular leverage there.

If you want to report a spam profile itself, and it doesn't have any posts that you can report, then probably the best thing to do is to just send a PM to a member of the moderator team to let us know about it.

Please don't post a public pointer to the account, for a few reasons:

• These people are trying to get publicity.  By posting their profile name publicly, you're just giving them more publicity.  Let's not do that. 
• Technically, it's not your place to call someone a spammer-- that's the moderators' job.  (Yes, it was pretty darn obvious in the examples you gave here, but it's the principle of the thing.)  As a general principle, we don't want any forum user to ever publicly call out any other forum user for any misbehavior, no matter how blatant-- the right way to handle that is to privately call the moderators' attention to it.  By report if possible, by PM if not.

I've taken the liberty of snipping the specific profiles you linked to in your post above, due to the "don't publicly call it out" thing.  Thank you for calling it to our attention, we appreciate it!