Okay, as a few of you know I run a writing forum. Things have been great - it's grown to 15,000 posts in only a few months and I've done little to do that. It practically built itself.

However, in the past few weeks the members have been seeing porn and spam posted, offensive PMs I wasn't aware of, and apparently a pediophile who was posting her views in her writing and PMing/IMing members with such content. (banned now).

A mod made a thread addressing the problem to the public with advice. The thread now has 87 posts and is barely a day old. The result is several several members leaving.

How should I handle this?

I know it's partially my fault for not really having solid rules established.

Thanks,

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Creative Writing|My Blog

Yeah, that's some thread. It's a shame these things happen but some people think they can get away with anything on the net. Having a look at the live links problem you mention in your Regarding Spam post.

Well, I don't know that there is much more that you can do other than banning the problem member and apologizing to the rest of your members.

If there are any members leaving over this, try your best to track them down and apologize personally...ask them if there is anything that you can do to change their minds, because you'd love to have them around. If they do in fact leave for good, contact them again a couple months from now to see if they're ready to come back...it may just be a matter of having some time away until they feel better about things.

Other than this, I dunno what else you can do...the damage has already been done and you've eliminated the source. In the future, you've just got to make sure that you (or somebody else) is constantly keeping an eye on your forums no matter how well you think things are going.

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...some super-sweet signature

Maybe a few more staff members are needed. It might make the community feel better if they see more re-enforcements coming in. J

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Thanks guys.

I don't know why yet, but within the past week the members who've visited in the past 24 hours has doubled. Heh.

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