DEALING WITH SPAMMERS - Please read !

[jstoddard]

Forum Participants

I need to remind everyone - PLEASE do not respond to spammers. I know it irks the hell out of everyone to have intruders posting crap on our forum, but the best thing you can do is completely and totally ignore them - and report them as you have been doing .

Every message posted to the forum hits my inbox first, along with all of your spam reports. The second I see a report, I delete the post and PERMANENTLY BAN the poster. Since I'm online literally 20/7 there's a really good chance it'll be gone in less than an hour -usually it's minutes.

here is nothing stopping them from making a new account and posting again, but what we do NOT want to do is give them any additional traffic or reason to keep posting here. The more we reply - the more they will post. We want these boards to be 100% unfruitful and not worth anyone's time.

I need everyone's continued help with this - not just on this board - on all of them. The other moderators need to deal with their own forums - and if they don't - Brad (the admin) gets to them fairly quickly. It's very rare anything sits more than a day as long as you keep reporting them.

But the best practice is total disengagement.

Thanks to everyone in advance.
JLS

[always-learning]

Thanks JOE for being on top of them....gosh darn-it spammers!


You're the tits !






Personally I like the little birds



lol

[Randy Bush]

Thanks Joe for doing a great job with this.

[Ted S.]

Yes, thanks Joe. I'm sorry I busted on a Spammer.

[jstoddard]

No need to apologize - I've done the same thing too many times to count. I just know that the more we engage, the more spam traffic we'll get - history proves that all over the web. The very best thing - report it, remove it, ban the account that posted it. Make this site fruitless and a PITA for them to deal with and some of them will go somewhere else. I cannot convince the powers that be to put into place a true human-reviewed registration system. I've volunteered to do the review myself - it would take me less time than doing the block and ban dance every day - and it would let me know our participants much better. But the concern at Hanley-Wood is that somehow having to approve people before they can start posting will take too much staff resources and they've uncomfortable with non-employees doing the work (in case we stop doing it and they have to cover it in-house). Valid concerns - but I've been moderating this forum since '98 - 13 going on 14 years now, so unless a bus hits me or they fire me I'm not going anywhere.

[dgbldr]

Joe,

Thanks for all you do.

I am curious if you think most spammers are humans or bots. You can eliminate the bots with a simple challenge and response routine at sign-up.

[Mark G]

Boy I have a hard time not responding. Aye aye, Cap'n Stoddard.

[Overbuilders]

Boy I have a hard time not responding. Aye aye, Cap'n Stoddard.

Me neither. Too. Also.

[gburnet]

Joe, it's been suggested by many here that a simple & effective way to deal with spammers is to limit a new registrant's ability to post links until they have maybe 50 or 100 posts under their belt. It's pretty apparent that most spam comes from recent registrants who dump their trash on the boards almost immediately after signing up.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this suggestion.

[WarriorWithWood]

it doesn't have to be 50-100 posts, 15 posts will suffice.