About Spam Posts

[Ben Ruset]

All:

Occasionally a spammer will come along and post a message on the forums. We have protection against a lot of automated spam-bots, but ones posted by real human beings will get through.

If you happen to see a spam post, you can report it to both myself and Guy by clicking on the

icon at the bottom of the post, on the left hand side.

As soon as we get a chance (which may be a few hours) we'll handle the offending post(s).

Thanks.

 

[Teegate]

I love deleting the accounts of spammers Makes my day.


Guy

 

[BEHR655]

All:

Occasionally a spammer will come along and post a message on the forums. We have protection against a lot of automated spam-bots, but ones posted by real human beings will get through.

If you happen to see a spam post, you can report it to both myself and Guy by clicking on the

icon at the bottom of the post, on the left hand side.

As soon as we get a chance (which may be a few hours) we'll handle the offending post(s).

Thanks.

Has that been there all the time???

 

[Ben Ruset]

Has that been there all the time???

For the last 2-3 years.

 

[BEHR655]

For the last 2-3 years.

Dang!

 

[Teegate]

One particular member here is very vigilant in reporting them.



Guy

 

[Ben Ruset]

One particular member here is very vigilant in reporting them.

Guy

And it's VERY appreciated!

 

[Sue Gremlin]

One particular member here is very vigilant in reporting them.



Guy

Would that be me? If it is, how embarrassing.


I am a moderator on a pretty large forum, so I am sort of tuned for spam. We get a lot of it.

 

[Teegate]

Would that be me?

That would be you.

Guy

 

[mike242424]

Good work

 

[GermanG]

The thing that confounds me is that there must be enough nitwits out there who respond to spammers soliciting on messageboards unrelated to what they are selling to make it worthwhile for them do keep doing it.

 

[BEHR655]

The thing that confounds me is that there must be enough nitwits out there who respond to spammers soliciting on messageboards unrelated to what they are selling to make it worthwhile for them do keep doing it.

Yup

 

[Sue Gremlin]

I think the spammers get paid per spam post, too. Don't know if it matters that it gets withdrawn. Like I said, I moderate a pretty large forum and we are constantly barraged. If we didn't have a lot of vigilant mods, the forum would be brought right to its knees, it would be all spam and no content.

 

[watchingtrainsgoby]

Like I said, I moderate a pretty large forum and we are constantly barraged.

Sue, if you dont mind my asking what is the other forum that you moderate?

 

[Sue Gremlin]

Check your PMs.

 

[Ben Ruset]

Yeah, unfortunately there isn't much we can do except react to these types of spammers.

They're real live humans that sign up with a valid email address, manually click on the "verify account" link, and make a real post. They generally make suitably generic accounts for themselves, so it's hard to know if it's a spammer by first look.

So pretty much what we can do is delete the post, delete the user, and block the IP. Not that blocking the IP does much anyway. There's probably close to 100 IP's that are blocked already.

Edit: I just added some software that might help. We'll see how that goes.

 

[Sue Gremlin]

We have a hack on our forum that allows you to moderate posts. It's the same software as this one, but I think it's updated to the latest version. It will allow you to block certain words from being posted, the posts will appear only to the moderators, and you will have to approve or otherwise moderate them. Takes a little learning but it's pretty effective. We have ours set to block url's posted by people with less than a certain number of posts.

Just looked it up, it's version 3.6.7.

 

[JerseyJim]

Guy is like Dirty Harry, LOL.