In case you all didn't know it, this forum is under constant attack by spammers and scammers, and without the literally constant vigilance of mostly Chris Kavanaugh and Doug Ritter and the occasional catch by myself, these message boards would long ago have been over-run with the noise that pollutes our in-boxes and the rest of the internet.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP
1. Of course, report any junk/marketing messages immediately. We now have 4 administrators, we all have the ablity to delete posts, but we're also not sitting here in the forum.
2. Don't reply to any junk posts. It might take a few hours for one of the admins to get to a place where we can login an kill it, but treat it like plutonium and STAY AWAY - on other forums I've noticed that some of these posts are including code that tried to install "malware"
(see Wikipedia) that takes over your Windows-based computer and turns it into a spam-sending zombie. You can't make this stuff up!
3. IN ALL CASES - here and in all other forums and email, don't respond to mass junk mailings. Not to unsubscribe and certainly NOT to buy their product or stock. Think about it - if someone came up to you at the mall parking lot with a handfull of pills and offered to sell them to you, would you buy? How about if some guy in a doorway was saying he had a "hot stock tip" for you? It's absurd to think that you're going to respond to that.
The reason spam continues is because dullards who don't know their gluteus maximus from their ulna perpetuate the trend by pecking at the advertisements like a chicken pecking at the dirt for something wriggly. It only takes 1 in a million to make spam worth sending for the spammer, but with two billion people online, that gives you a potential market in the millions. Unfortunately, that means that there are millions of dingbats who swarm to these junk offers in the way flies swarm to....well, if you've been alive more than 6 years, you know what I mean.
One day, ETS will have the money to support an updated forum software package that will allow members of the forum to flag a message as junk, and kill it. Until then, the human firewall remains in effect. And please, be Equipped to use the Internet wisely.
Thanks for your help.