Can we SHAME people for spamming and copy/paste replies?

[Sam McCormack]

Not sure about everyone else but I often see people copy and paste replies. Normally around 3-5/day. Am I crazy? Is this anyone else? And if i'm not crazy and others are seeing it, can we push them in the right direction? I used to be a part of that crowd of people who would self advertise a TON, but some people are absolutely ridiculous with how much they post and I think it's up to others to give them "criticism" so that way they aren't polluting the forums

[JD Martin]

Quote from @Mike Kirby:

Quote from @Chris Seveney:

Flag them for moderators to remove

    I don't think that will help. You are a moderator. You see the same people posting the same post every few days trying to get some inexperienced people to pay them for their knowledge and no moderator does anything about it. It's such a shame, this used to be a forum where people helped each other answer legitimate questions for free.
     Don't get me wrong, there are still some good people offering good free advice but it gets harder and harder to come back and look for meaningful posts because you have to wade through so much garbage to find any nuggets of gold.

 Flagging posts does make a difference. I can see every outstanding post that's been flagged for review; so can all moderators (there are none right now). If you see cut & paste repeat posts, absolutely flag them so they can be reviewed as that is a forum violation. If someone is just posting thinly veiled advertising, that's a little tougher to police but certainly feel free to flag anything you think might be so and someone will take a look at it.

Without the public's assistance a lot of stuff will get by the moderators. Today alone there are well over 100 threads of activity, and Sunday tends to be a slow day. There's just no way we can reasonably review every active thread and compare it with everything else to identify all spammers. If you live in a city, surely no one thinks the cops just happen to see all crimes being committed? No, the public calls in crimes and the police investigate. That's what needs to happen here. 

Also, to use the same analogy, a lot of crimes are caught and rectified before the BP public even knows it happened. Us Billy Mumys send lots of posts, threads and users to the cornfield without fanfare.