Junk Messages, The Forum and The Human Firewall

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.

Any thoughts to requiring a moderator to ok a new member before they can post?

I don't really think that will help, but maybe a tip: If you see a post with a suspicious title, look at the poster. If it's a first poster, it probably is spam.

(not offending newbie's in any way!!)

I can assure you it will. Many of the forums I frequent do that. In some cases you have to wait a couple of days to be vetted. The biggest task is filtering out alias email addresses. Of course it puts a burden on the mods at the outset, but saves the headache on the back end.

Although I don't question the intregetry (sp??) of the mod's, I somehow don't like the idea that one person can decide if
a newbie can join the forum or not. It makes me feel somehow that it prevents having a open-forum for everybody. <img src="/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

Allthough I think this, It's probably a better idea to do what you proposed... <img src="/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />

I'm probably crazy... <img src="/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

One method that seems to work pretty well on some Yahoo forums is that new members default to moderated status. As soon as they make their first post (assuming that it is at least somewhat on-topic) the moderator promptly approves it and switches them to non-moderated status like everyone else.

Personally, I find this less obtrusive than waiting for the moderator to approve my membership before I can even try posting. Just be sure to explain to the new member that this is being done to prevent spam rather than as some type of probation or censorship. Spammers are not likely to take the time to comprehend the subject matter of a forum and compose a relevant post.

[color:"blue"] "One method that seems to work pretty well on some Yahoo forums is that new members default to moderated status." [/color]

I fully agree with Tom here. The forums that I frequent that use this tactic of moderating the first post before posting to the group are essentially spam free. The forums that don't moderate first posts are plagued with spam. Some very good and active groups have essentially died, with members leaving rather than wade through an offensive flood of porn and viagra posts.

TR

Yes, and they have moderators who get paychecks from Yahoo who spend thier entire time babysitting a block of forums.

I hate to say it, but what we've got right now is the best alternative without changing the openness of this place. For better and worse, all are welcome here until they torque off too many people or blatantly violate the TOS.

I don't know if the version of the software we're using has that feature - I'm familiar with it, as I moderate 4 Yahoo groups (and no, it's not a paid gig) and that's a very helpful feature. It's not foolproof, but it helps.

Thanks for that post. In answer to some of the suggestions and questions:

The current forum software is set up to require one of the moderators to approve new members. We catch the vast majority of spammers that way. You can set your watch by when some of them automagically do it. <sigh> The new version of the forum software will allow us to define certain problem domains and they will automagically be deleted without our intervention. That covers about 90% of them. The remaining we have to do manually. Some are obvious and we can catch. Some are more devious, using normal ISP addresses and they may get through. But, as noted in his post, if you just ignore them, we will catch them and delete them. The software we are using has only these limited tools. But, they will suffice. It could be lots worse. We can moderate posts, but right now it is all or nothing.

It is hoped that future software updates will provide more anti-spam tools, but for now at least, it's under control, if not totally eliminated. Best we can hope for at the moment.

Our present system is rather simple. A new member submits a request to join. We see a forum name, email and their ISP #. Most of the spammers are pathetically obvious; medsforu and sexysally for example. We've had a few slip in along with some trolls and those of overt religosity. Aside from that approvals are a given, no litmus tests or voter stubs.