The majority of spam comes fro users who are serfs? The kind who don't even look at the rules since they don't last very long? Stricter rules won't help clear these people out.

No, more from AP farmers. Not necessarily stricter rules, but more harsh consequences.

Something seriously has to be done about the game comments. Forget merits, there are at least a handful of AP farmers in the top 100 alone who are getting away with leaving short thoughtless comments on games without consequences, not to mention that there are plenty of others who are within a couple thousand points from it who have gotten there from doing the exact same thing.

Since there's so much spam in those game comments now, it's basically impossible to weed out every single game comment spammer. The best solution would just be to delete all the nonconstructive and nonspecific thoughtless comments, but even that doesn't seem like it's being done. It must be taken into consideration that, no matter how tedious it is, every game comment page must be checked fairly often and cleaned out if needed. Otherwise you give every new user the mentality that it's perfectly fine to spam your way into the top 100 if nothing is going to be done about it anyway.

Mods, this is not your fault and I don't want any of you to think I'm criticizing the way you do your job. There are only 2 or 3 of you who log in fairly frequently, so there's no way you'd be able to delete pages of spam from 2600 games regularly while still maintaining the forums and the rest of the site. That's understandable. The problem is, there are only 2 or 3 of you who log in fairly frequently, and that clearly isn't enough people for a site with thousands upon thousands of comments flooding in every day.

This has been an issue for too long and it can't be ignored for any longer; the team needs to be expanded one way or another. It isn't fine the way it is, and it will help to appoint new people to the position. You guys are doing a great job and I don't want you to think otherwise, but there just aren't enough of you to maintain the mass amounts of people. 5 robots programmed to delete spam wouldn't be enough; there are just too many people.

If I see more people on the team, I will have faith that the site is heading in the right direction again.

your right

We will wait for the mods to be more active i hope

More mods isn't going to solve anything.

Why then, did AP farmers actually get punished when there were a few more active mods on the team, whereas now they're going completely unnoticed? I could easily give a list of blatant game comment spammers, but their spam comments are now so far back behind pages of more recent "quick feedback" that linking to enough of their comments to convict them would be more of a pain for both the reporter and the reportee than just expanding the team and waiting for someone to clean out the game pages.

You can't honestly say that more mods on the team isn't going to change anything if it hasn't even been tried. Adding one new moderator every two years isn't "more mods", especially if at least one becomes inactive every year. That's a loss of half a moderator each year (or something like that). Is it really impossible to think that there's a direct correlation between this annual net loss and the site quality that's been plummeting since 2009?

If the quality of peoples comments grew then it might not be a problem. For example you do not get a merit for just saying things like "Great games" or short comments. Most people can't be bothered to write a long comment just to get a merit.

Why then, did AP farmers actually get punished when there were a few more active mods on the team, whereas now they're going completely unnoticed? I could easily give a list of blatant game comment spammers, but their spam comments are now so far back behind pages of more recent "quick feedback" that linking to enough of their comments to convict them would be more of a pain for both the reporter and the reportee than just expanding the team and waiting for someone to clean out the game pages.

You can't honestly say that more mods on the team isn't going to change anything if it hasn't even been tried. Adding one new moderator every two years isn't "more mods", especially if at least one becomes inactive every year. That's a loss of half a moderator each year (or something like that). Is it really impossible to think that there's a direct correlation between this annual net loss and the site quality that's been plummeting since 2009?

I second this. Couldn't have said it any better myself. I applaud you, good sir.

The fact that you don't when you can report these blatant spammers reflect rather poorly on you.

If each one of these blatant spammers has an average of 2000 spam comments, even if there are only 10 of these users in question, that's 20000 comments to report. 200 full game pages of spam comments scattered across 2600 games. That's one hell of a lot of links to report.

Does flagging actually do anything nowadays? I remember it didn't used to, but I'll try it if you insist it will do me some good. Just as long as it doesn't look like I'm abusing the feature.

No one likes to volunteer themselves to deal with spam. No one.

Who is talking about volunteering? Since when has that ever been an option?