Is it really okay that users are making advertisement threads?

I agree--its frustrating to see the forum filled with so many. And no, it isn't allowed. I know it isn't ideal, but I report them by clicking the flag and categorizing them as "other"--you are welcome to flag them when you see them, it's helpful in getting them deleted eventually.

@grilledavocado That's a more complicated question than it seems.

Historically, 7 Cups benefited from the spam because it had the effect of promoting 7 Cups in search engine rankings (Google, Bing, etc.) and it also increased the number of visitors to the website, even if those visitors were only looking for lotions

Later, 7 Cups removed the forums from the search engines, but spammers still make many (fake) member accounts, so they still boost the number of members 7 Cups appears to have, and it's possible this is still useful for 7 Cups' marketing purposes.

The latest news about spam was in the December 2019 Community Update, which seemed to hint that some action might be taken at last.

It's technically quite simple for 7 Cups to block the spam. Some time ago I made a forum spam filter for my own use and I think it only took me a couple of hours. But unfortunately 7 Cups has never been very responsive to the community's technical needs, and what might have taken me a couple of hours might yet take 7 Cups many months, or be bumped off the to-do list by something else and forgotten.

Charlie

@grilledavocado

please feel free to let someone know! Quickest way is to PM a mentor or use the listener support room to see if anyone is around who can do it. Each post should also let you flag it so the forum flag team can get it :)

Yeah this website isn't supposed to be used for that.

Just wanted to say that I daily continue to check the forum for spam and flag it for removal and (in my experience) the lag time for posts being deleted has gotten a lot shorter--I notice the posts being gone much earlier in the day after I flag as opposed to still being up for days. Ideally there'd be a better block to these posts being created in the first place, but wanted to acknowledge that in my opinion things seem to be improving!

@Shanna

they changed things recently to help forum safety!

I just got a drive by Zoom meeting advertisement. I reported it.

I guess 7Cups will decide to do something about it when it starts making people leave the site.

But judging how they aren't doing anything on people just using 7Cups to solicit dates, I won't hold my breath.

No it's not

No it's not