I understand your point, Vegan, but I don't think you understand the scale of the spam we receive and subsequently delete.
You may think of any members that sign up here, discuss, mention or link their music within their first few posts while genuinely doing so without intention to exclusively spam our forum. You may think of the existence of these members and have concerns that we would treat these members the same as everyone else, spammer wise, and you may think that this not fair. I understand that.
However the fact of the matter is that a lot of accounts are made here every day, every week, every month and I would say that the vast majority of accounts made are spam accounts. When a new account is made I will go and check their first few posts. If their very first action as a member of this forum is to talk about their music, name their band, ask for feedback on their music and try to get you to click an external link or google their band name then I will delete their posts and ban their account. 99.9% of the time that member will have been correctly banned and on the rare occasions that I would be wrong, I would apologise If I felt it were necessary.
What is the alternative though? Should we air on the side of caution? Should we give these members a day or two so we can be completely, 100% certain that they arent also here to contribute to the forum? Personally, no, I dont think we should. This would lead to a huge number of threads from people who only want you to listen to their music, who only want to use our forum for this reason and if we didn't clear them out right away then it would only promote this on our site and lead to an even greater number of users signing up for the very same reasons. If we did this and adopted your attitude or took your approach then, with all due respect once more, we and yourself would spend way too much time attempting to engage members in conversation when they a) dont care aslong as you click their link and b) may never even see your post because once they have spammed they may never even log into their account ever again.
I trust Urbans judgement. He's been here long enough to know a spammer when he sees one. If he had banned an account for spam and then realised he had made a mistake I'm sure he would come clean about it and put it right. Even if it is the case that this member did not come here to spam, they claim, then they could have made another accoun and messaged a moderator to straighten things out. Coming back with an attitude like this isnt gonna help to convince me that they were here for a genuine reason to begin with or had anything to contribute to the forum I am trusted to moderate and use my judgement to keep in order. Basically if it is possible for a moderator to think that you may be a spammer, then you obviously didn't choose your first few posts well.
I may not have made the decision to post what Vanilla posted but believe me, I was thinking it. I'm sorry if this member was one of the 0.01%, and I assure you that I use my judgement on this forum in a genuine attempt to be as fair as I possibly can be, but for the reasons I gave above and for their overall attitude and etiquette, I share her sentiment. And I don't feel bad about it.
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