Serious spam problem

[nicka]

These forums have had a serious spam problem for a few weeks now. It's making them significantly less useful, because most apparently new posts are just spam. The greater effort involved in finding real posts makes it inevitable that fewer people will read them.

Could the forum administrators try to do something about this?

[shades]

Yes, indeed. It is annoying, at best.

[suavito]

So true. Right at this moment 80% of the top ten postings in this sub-forum are trying to sell us crap.

And another 10% is a thread complaining about this plague – the very one you're looking at. Sigh.

[Mart°n]

I too find the current forum near to useless. I’ve reported a lot of those spam postings but nothing happened. I won’t take the time to digg to all this spam but will leave this forum if the problem won’t be solved. Maybe a different captcha or a “manual“ user account activation will help to keep the bots out of this nice place.

[nicka]

Also, the admins could appoint some deputies to run the spammers out of town: that is, they could give some of us enough access privileges to delete posts and user accounts. Then Mart°n (for example) could just kill the account of a spammer, rather than having to report it. It would save time for everyone.

[Mart°n]

I thought of the same thing (to have some forum Sheriffs which have privileges to delete the spam-bot user accounts, but as they can get in that easy, the login procedure also should be changed.

[aechallu]

One possibility is to have a gotcha every time a user posts from an unverified computer.

In any case, I'm all about reclaiming the forum for us users and honest wanderers!

[Mart°n]

I think it would be most helpful to the forum in general, if real users aren’t bothered too much but the admins or the sheriff take care of the forum. Apart from a different captcha mechanism, the forum moderator or sheriff could check or approve the very first post of a new user. This would take a small expense while being (at least with the current spam-bots) 100 % accurate.

[Hans-Reinhard Koch]

Dear all,
The spam problem is indeed a nuisance. And I miss a comment of someone from the Redlers about this serious problem.
I have just checked the Bookends forum and found no spam. Maybe Jon purges the forum manually (poor one!) or they have found a way to do this automatically? Maybe the Redlers could exchange ideas with the Sonny people about keeping the forum clean?
Hans-Reinhard

[Mart°n]

Yeah, that’s what i’ve been waiting for.

[suavito]

Q. E. D.