unfortunately, the admin's reaction on this remove list for advertisers is minimal... i have not seen any of the advertising PB accounts being removed in a useful time span.
the problem seems to lie deeper than just reporting their activity:
- most of these advertisers for fake handbags, etc. appear during daytime in the asian time zone, i.e. in the middle of the night in the U.S. - where noone seems to be awake to admin the site. additionally, i believe it's still just 1 or max. 2 person who do the admin maintenance for the whole site (probably for free); while there is a potentially endless amount of advertisers out there.
- it is fairly easy to set up a new account on PB (one of the reasons why PB is popular with the normal crowd of people not all too familiar with the internet; but also with spammers). this means, even if the same person posts these ads, they can easily evade deletion by just setting up a new account. from the structure and content of most of these handbags, shoes and other fake product ads, i believe they are all done with more or less the same template - so my guess is there is only a few people actually involved in it - but since one person can set up indefinite amounts of PB accounts, they are hard to catch unless you put in a system that bans actual IP addresses of the computers used.
- although there is a paragraph in the "terms of use" of this site that prohibits commercial use of a PB account, it is very difficult to implement clear a clear control over this issue. this makes it impossible to write automated scripts or code software that would maintain PB free of such accounts: the rules are simply too difficult to implement.
because of all of this, i think we will have to give up on asking the admins/owners of PB to do the required maintenance for removing spammers and advertisers. several options are possible and may be able to implement:
- "self service": like CHOSSID suggests; deal with spammers in your comments fast and thoroughly by deleting them immediately and send a flag message to michael zhang. this won't remove spammers automatically but reduces their effect and helps to make PB "unattractive" for spammers.
- "neighbor watch": maybe the admins could set up a small group of trusted users with admin rights to delete or hide (if the system allows this) advertising accounts. i don't know if there would be people out there volunteering for that and how we could balance this between dictatorship terror and self community help, but i know of several communities experimenting with such "user admins" and they are quite successful in keeping their sites clean of spam and porn. - however, this would probably require the whole PB system to become much more of an open organization as it currently is; i am not sure if that lies within the intend of the owners.
