Damnable Spam

[scottishmoney]

Isn't there registration approval? I see spam just about everytime I go on here.

[Geordie582]

Just don't open it!

[scottishmoney]

Oh I don't, but I still see the postings and wonder how they can post? Were they approved?

[Chris Perkins]

For people that simply want to ask a question and don't want to register I have left registration non compusary. Every time we are spammed I ban the whole IP range of the spammer, but it's a loosing battle, they simply hijack other mail servers and get their spam bots (it's all automated, there are no actual people doing it) to spam me from there. The only reason they do it is in the hopes that google and other major search engines see it and rank their pages.

They used to register and then spam from a registered account, but I vet all registrants now and rarely let people become members that are based in China, Korea, Russia, the Ukraine and several other No.1 spam lands.

I delete it straight away throughout the day, so there is probably lots of spam that only I see!

[Sylvester]

I've picked up upon three spam posts this evening, two of which i've deleted. The other is in this area about furniture of all things from the look of it but i'm not in control of that area so there's nothing i can do about that one.

Someone bet me to the other reported one this morning.

There's does seem to be alot of spam around these parts lately!

[TomGoodheart]

Quite so.

Well, I think it's funny....

[scottishmoney]

So did we.

[Chris Perkins]

The spam has really been getting on my *$*s lately! The more visitors a forum has, the more it is targeted by spam bots. And the predecimal forum is regularly indexed by Google, hence the attempts by spammers to list their rubbish and also get that indexed by Google.

On Christmas day I thought the spam might be quieter, but no, there were 6 auto posted messages containing various ellicit links originating from various foreign countries!

It's a help having scottishmoney to delete things, but what I've done lately is make the 'Enquiries about British coins' area (the most spammed area of late) an approval only forum. That means that when you post a new topic in there it won't be visible until I OK it. Within an hour there are already 2 spam messages waiting in the queue!

[Emperor Oli]

what I've done lately is make the 'Enquiries about British coins' area (the most spammed area of late) an approval only forum. That means that when you post a new topic in there it won't be visible until I OK it. Within an hour there are already 2 spam messages waiting in the queue!

That's where I saw quite a few coming from. I tend to click on "Today's Active Topics" at the bottom and noticed that the British bit was getting quite a few more than other sub-forums. It's quite a bind deleting them from the active topics page so I go into the sub-forum itself and use the check boxes at the side. It would be nice if such boxes could be added in the active topics page, but I don't know if the board software supports that.

[scottishmoney]

Of course it would be busy on Christmas day and the Boxing holiday also, since they do not have such nonsensical holidays in Spamland.

[Chris Perkins]

They certainly don't in Korea, which is part of Eastern Spamland.

[scottishmoney]

It is this guy we are up against. Captain Kung Pao from N. Korea.

[Geordie582]

We can just hope that the pathetic juvenile losers will one day grow up!

[Rob]

It's getting depressingly worse. Having returned after a week away over Christmas, 46 of the 121 emails in my inbox were for Viagra and that is the number that got past the spam filter.

[Chris Perkins]

I check emails in the morning usually and it is awful. Once I had 75 new messages, all spam except 2 of them!

They only do it because it's easy and anonymous even if they generate very little business, it doesn't really matter because you can send the same message to millions of email addresses and then move on to the next.

I think it's such a world problem that diplomatic pressure should be put on countries like Russia, China, Korea etc to make it more difficult for the people there doing the vast majority of it.

[scottishmoney]

I seriously believe especially with China and Russia that not only is spam and hacking not discouraged, but that in fact in the pursuit of having a means of destructive capability on an otherwise unimaginable scale that the governments of those nations might actually be encouraging it elicitly of course.

[Geordie582]

I've always thought that, although the WWW is a good idea, it opens great possibilities for global influence and corruption. It's a pity all the brains in the computer world cannot solve such a basic problem.

Oh! And happy New Year to all - except spammers of course, - a plague on all their houses.