As the original poster of this thread, let me clarify my thoughts.
First of all, I was in a particularly bad mood the day I posted the
original email. For that, gomen nasai.
What really ticked me off was the weather reports. This was not
creative spam;it was merely reporting on local conditions. This was of
absolutely no interest to anyone, did not create any ambience, and did
not contribute to a creative atmosphere. In fact, one poster revelled
in the delicious non-relevance of the posts, celebrating how evil it
was.
*That* was what got to me. I achieved one minor victory; the weather
reports stopped after my post.
My position is this:
Spam is something to be tolerated. It happens, and there's nothing you
can do about it. I delete it unread, because it's just not funny 98% of
the time.
However, if you're going to spam, try to follow a couple of rules, if
you could:
1) Make sure your spam serves a purpose. :) Even if it's just being
funny, or welcoming someone back, make sure someone cares. An example
of spam that does not fall into that category was the "weather reports"
spam that I exploded over.
2) If you're creating spam in response to something brought up in
another thread, change the subject. Someone said something in response
to one of the chapters of "Thy Inward Love" that I posted, and it
started a long spam thread. Alas, I had to sort through all of it,
trying to separate the C&C from the spam. I did not enjoy it. Please,
a modicrum of consideration can go a long way. The GRIT threads on
r.a.a.m are a good example of this - by marking their threads as GRIT,
it steers people who aren't interested in those threads away. It would
be great if we did something similar here.
Now, my last comment. As you can guess, I'm not much in favor of spam.
The FFML has garnered a reputation for having a lot of spam, and this
drives people away. This is truly sad; who knows what wonderful pieces
of fanfiction we may have missed as a result? Who can say what budding
author did not get a chance to bloom as a result of the helpful C&C that
can be obtained here? I can say that no one comes for the spam.
I'm toying with the idea of creating my own, moderated fanfic ML for
serious fanfic discussion. Unfortunately, I don't think I have the
capacity or the time or enough asbestos armor to pull it off. It is
somewhat sad that I have to consider resorting to such tactics.
Again, just a *little* consideration on the part of the spammers would
go a long way to alleviating the problem. For my part, I've learned to
delete messages unread that are marked appropriately. Please do your
part to mark them so.
Thanks for listening. I like you all; really I do. ^_^