Spam

[margaux 171]

To all forum participants who are human - Please don't respond to or encourage any kind of spam. I say this because on another forum, a similar situation has arisen and the forum is so riddled with spam that it has made the forum unenjoyable and most of the regulars have left. It started with one or two posts/comments and eventually a considerable percentage of the threads were infected.

 

I think the site administrator has to disable the accounts.If a mechanism were set up for participants to report spam this will help the administrator quickly identify accounts that at least need monitoring.

[Larry 426]

There is a way to report spam and I do block the accounts and delete the spam as quickly as I can.

[HartleySan 826]

Yes, I try to report spam whenever I notice it. That's a good idea.

Is there any way you can easily beef up the forum security to block such accounts from being created in the first place?

[Larry 426]

In terms of beefing up security, there's already CAPTCHA plus a registration question that's unlikely to be answerable by bots. Registration also requires email verification. And I'm running IPBoard, which shares spammer information across all sites using IPBoard, and can block known usernames and email addresses.

 

Right now, there's maybe 1 or 2 spammers per month (Holmes, by the way, was not a spammer). Although I'd love for there to be 0 spammers, I don't think it constitutes a problem, certainly not one worth my time to try to solve. A couple of times a month, someone posts spam, everyone ignores it (or should), and then I come in and block the account and delete the post. No big deal.

 

That being said, if you want to see what's possible in terms of beefing up the IPBoard security and let me know what's possible, feel free.

[margaux 171]

@Larry, I figured you were on top of this. Can you point out where to report spam?

 

I started this topic as another forum I frequent became almost unusable. A big issue was the site owner/administrator didn't spend enough time administering to the site. An issue for him was that he didn't want to spend the time trawling through threads/accounts to determine if they were spam so it is helpful if potential spam posts were identified to him. It was amazing how quickly it spread once it started and was not dealt with.

 

Thanks for a great learning resource.

[HartleySan 826]

Just mouse over the spam post, and the Report button should light up.

Click the button and then write in a quick description of the problem to send it off.