Can we get better forum moderation of the obvious grifters?

There's about five or six users on this site who are constantly promoting their tarot courses, spiritual consultations, ghost-hunting apps, and "certified medium" services. Most of them violate the rules about self-promotion but they keep getting away with it because they're not aggressive about it - just casually mentioning their services in every post.

It's obviously affecting the quality of discussion because genuine researchers don't want to contribute to forums that are basically marketplaces for paranormal services. Can the moderation team get more strict about this? There should probably be a "commercial content" rule that actually gets enforced.

I've noticed this too and it's definitely a problem. The line between "sharing your professional services" and "ongoing commercial promotion" gets blurry but there's definitely accounts crossing it regularly. A clear policy about how many times per month you can mention your services might help.

Moderation team here - we actually do monitor this and we're fairly consistent about removing blatant spam. The issue is when people are being subtle about it, we get reports and we review but sometimes it's genuinely in a grey area. If anyone sees obvious rule violations please use the report function rather than complaining in threads - that actually gets our attention faster.

There's about five or six users on this site who are constantly promoting their tarot courses

Completely agree. I'd rather see some of those accounts banned and lose a few users than have Quirk Reports turn into a marketplace. The site's value is supposed to be the discussion, not flogging services. Stricter moderation would improve the atmosphere significantly.

Devil's advocate though - some of these people genuinely do offer useful services and they're just mentioning what they do when it's relevant. Hard to distinguish between organic conversation and subtle marketing. Maybe just clarify the rules in a sticky post and let the community police itself through downvotes?

A separate "professional services" section where people could advertise without it cluttering the discussion forums might be better than just banning commercial content entirely. Some users are legitimate professionals and they've got the right to mention their work - just not constantly in every thread.