The ongoing proliferation of Spam

[grant]

Just thought I would post this once, and Phil can delete it after cleanup, there are 9 Spam posts that were just reported by dead beat spammer Richerd. So long!

[Phil]

Hope there will be more attention to these things

And that's one of the SPAMmers, saying that. Cheeky s**!!!!

We do our best to keep them out. Alas, some do get through, because they join manually, and can add up... As soon as we spot their efforts, we ban them and delete their posts. But we are busy (and we have to sleep!), and can't spend all our time on here, so inevitably some messages stay up for a while. I hope you understand.

Cheers,
Phil

[Phil]

This morning I've banned five spammers, and deleted about thirty spam messages from various places - including some really old ones we'd all missed. I have got things I'd far rather be doing than deleting spam and banning spammers, so I'm a mite fed up. Anyone even appearing as if they might be thinking of misbehaving is likely to get short shrift from me today...

Posting a 'Me too!' style message with a URL in your .sig might just get you in BIG trouble today - a bit like carrying a toy gun into a bank. I might not be in the mood for checking whether the URL is legit or not.

Capriciously yours,
Phil

[Big Al]

Give Grant the rights to ban spammers! That will help your "round the clock" vigilance. He is a few hours behind us here in the UK and he spots a lot of them, anyway!

[Parus Ater]

I'm on an astronomy forum and they've got the ability in their software to have it that the option for a signature in the CP is missing until you have made fifteen posts, been registered for more than 24 hours and on top of that you have to log out and back in again. My re-enactment group forum has it that every registration needs manual confirming based on profiling the email address and the username and we also block email addresses and ISP's from certain problem parts of the world. If you try and register with a flagged ISP type you get a contact us box to fill in to tell us you're real.

No idea if these things can be done on phpBB, though.

[Paul @ Warlord Games]

Afternoon!

We're currently looking at the way to block the spammers. Several options open to us but this is something we want to fix sooner rather than later...

[Colonel White]

Still think you could do with another moderator to help Phil.

I second the vote for Grant as he can scour the site whilst we are all tucked up in bed.

He is probably the most regular poster of all our Overseas Friends .

[grant]

Thanks for the votes of confidence, guys! Last night alone I sent NINE reports in, at around 2300hrs, just before sleep.

I did mention that if they need help, that I would be happy to suit up and kill the spammers as they appear! There are few things more annoying.

We have an awesome, helpful, non-argumentative community (forthe most part ) so it's really just the spam that needs to be killed!

[Colonel White]

For me it just makes good sense. Phil is overworked and it is inpossible for him to be vigilant 24 hours a day. Hes got a busy day job as well.

Most other Forum sites even smaller ones than ours have more moderators. Paul has atready admitted that he is busy at Warlord and can't always act as quickly as he would have liked. For me its a no brainer.

Also if it is shown that if a forum site is slow to act it will just encourage more spam activity.

[grant]

I am 7 hours different from the UK, so I see the later at night stuff. Many years ago, I became the first spam-killer on GHQ models' forum, to great success. No more spam!