I'm kind of bothered by the fact that i had to register separately for the community site as apposed to simply extending my customer-portal login, and that there didn't appear to be any verification that i use a verizon phone during the process, but i guess i have come this far, so here goes...
So, i seem to have found my way to the block numbers page on verizon's website, but after some initial success it appears i have run up against a limit of five(5) numbers max i can block. The past election cycle has been a pain as far as being inundated with spam, and making my phone unusable, and i counted more than One Hundred(100) different numbers spam-texted to me in the past 2 months, not even including spam-calls. There is also the issue that some of the repeat offenders seem to be using special short-digit numbers which do not seem to work with verizon's block number function; the block-number page seems to only want 10-digit numbers.
Until recently i was trying to use the spam-reporting function in-built into my kyocera duraxv extreme+, though the process involved in reporting spam is sort of inefficient, and reporting didn't actually prevent the same numbers from spamming me again. My spam problem seems to have picked up as we headed toward election season, and so it became impossible to keep up by mid-summer this year.
I like my phone for various reasons not including spam-prevention, and intend to keep it, but it would be nice to have a more streamlined way of reporting spam(and blocking numbers) within the phone. Right now, if i want to report a spam text, I first have to select "mark spam" within the message. I then receive a confirmation text where i am supposed to reply with the offending number; maybe other people with immaculate short-term digits recall can simply type in the number, but for me i have to copy-paste which isn't made easy by the phone interface.
So when you count through all the steps it comes out to something like the following: *click the spam message*->options->recipient_list->new_msg->*arrow up to the number*->entry_mode->select_text->*copy the text*->*go back to confirmation message from verizon*->entry_mode->past_list->*paste the text*->click_send.
So i guess basically i am wondering: How hard is it to make this(reporting spam-texts) a single menu item? And how do i block more numbers? And can other members of a family plan also do this for their phones?
Anyway, on the topic of spam-callers, there does appear to be an "add to call rejection" option for a missed call though i haven't tested it yet, and my experience is that the robot voice assistant interface for voicemail really slows down the process of screening junk-calls. Actually the voicmail interface is simply very bad in my opinion. She starts by reading the callers number, even if it is someone in your contacts list, and there doesn't seem to be a way to skip over this, nor is there a way to copy a caller's number from within the voicemail interface. This all basically creates a problem where after the user has exited voicemail, they have no clue which numbers are spam versus people they need to add to their contacts list; this is with exception to people with an excellent memory for phone-numbers.
This whole problem could be fixed by changing the way voicemails are accessed from using the current robot-voice interface to a menu within the phone OS(like on most modern smart-phones). I don't see how this couldn't be achieved within the duraxv's OS, and currently there is plenty of space within call-history for another menu item for voicemail. Users could enter a voicemail menu where they could then click individual numbers to either listen to a message or delete a message or add a number to a reject list.
Basically i guess that makes question two: Why isn't my voicemail accessible within the phone's OS, but rather takes me to a robot voice-assistant? Could voicemail be better and perhaps interface with the reject-call list?
At this point I have probably 200 spam-numbers i have painstakingly copied manually from my phone. I'm not including them here. I'm wondering what the best course of action is to get all these number reported and block, and to do it efficiently?
