Spam Alerts Here

[Celyn]

With a pointy and sharpened deleting stick! Fear my wrath, o ye spammers.

[Babz]

exhidswix is no longer allowed to post....another spammer bit the dust !!

[Celyn]

Heh, goody goody Babbzzi! Did you remember to put some anthrax in the dust for him to bite?

(Oy, who says I am becoming a bit too nasty-minded here?)

[ScotSites]

Why was someone with a name like exhidswix allowed to post in the first place? Does the admin not check the registration details before allowing even the obvious trolls through?

[Celyn]

Originally Posted by ScotSites

Why was someone with a name like exhidswix allowed to post in the first place? Does the admin not check the registration details before allowing even the obvious trolls through?

Well, no. Admin is quite a busy person really, and just exactly HOW can one tell that it is an obvious AND definite troll? Yes, it had a daft-looking name, but some reasonable people do go on internet message boards with daft names, oddly enough.

I do not, for instance, have my electricity bill, and the dreaded council tax bill, posted to Celyn, number thingmie, xxxx Street, Glasgow, because such entities tend to prefer a different sort of name. I don't suppose you have all that much mail addressed to Ms/Mr Scotsites, either, because you might just have a different name.

Just to target the sillier looking names would not get round the spammers that turn up as innocent-sounding "Jenny" or "David" or whatever. But you know all this: don't you run a site yourself?

Just be alert (remember, old badge from the 1970's - "your country need Lerts!" ) and tell Admin and mods whenever you see the evil spammers at work. This SPAM Alert thread works fairly well as I have set it to send me email whenever there is any post in here, and I suppose Babz and Kathy and Admin have done so too. You must allow for some time differences and must allow for people being busy and not being online, but mostly it works quite well. Not perfectly, but workable. Also send a PM to any and all mods and Admin and the first one to come along will deal with it.

BUT I am now quite taken with the idea of telling the electricity bods and the council tax bods and a whole lot of other people to address their post to "Celyn". Oh, yes, worth a try, eh? Heck, looking at my over-overdrawn bank account, anything is worth a try.

[kathyv]

Members reporting suspected trolls and spammers are the best defenses we have. We do need to give new members the benefit of the doubt. And, some countries spell things oddly and that may look suspicious when really it's a clever nickname or an attempt at something original.

In my experience, the most spam comes from a seemingly normal name, e-mail address or something that looks similar to something known, and I don't mean just here, I get a screening alert weekly from my home e-mail provider and it's crammed full of things from normal looking names. I don't recognize them or they are targeted as suspicious by my ISP, thank goodness, or I'd spend all my time cleaning up after the trolls and spammers in my in box!

It might take us an hour or 2 or even a day or so, but I promise that we will get them and clean them out, and if we don't catch something and you did, just let us know.

[ScotSites]

Celyn and Kathy, I don't disagree with what either of you are saying. However there are many other forums (some as "popular" as this one) where the sort of poster we have just seen does NOT get as far as being authorised let alone allowed to post. Maybe the admin on those forums (fora?) don't give the odd looking names the benefit of the doubt... or maybe through experience they have a better idea what is genuine and what is spam. They also probably read up on what other steps they can take (blocking email and IP addresses of known spammers) to stop many of them getting through. ok so maybe they also lose some genuine people along the way, but the end result is forums/fora that don't have a load of drug and/or porn related links added to posts! So maybe the busy admin here isn't really doing his/her job properly and is instead expecting all of us to do it in their place!

Out of curiosity, once this spammer was taken care of, was the email and IP address added to the "blocked" list to stop them just doing the same all over again?