PowerSwitch

How the f**k do these spam-bots get in???? I battle to sign-up, what with the squiggly security stuff and required fields, yet these automated things created by scum just seem to get in and destroy sites with impunity. I first saw this kitchen crap pop up on Freeconomy a week ago, the site is currently obliterated and the guy's are struggling with it. It's still there now, just marked "spam" in the heading, but still hundreds of posts a day in all topics. Best of luck to the Admins on PS, hope you manage to kill it quick.

There does seem to be a great number of dodgy kitchen adverts on this and other forums at present.
I delete them and ban the "members" promptly, so at least they dont pollute the forums for too long.

On most forums, a moderator can only delete posts, not remove members.
Usually only a site admin can delete members, and if the site admin is busy or away then the spammers post prolificly.

I suspect that on some forums, that banning or deleting members requires a decision by several persons thereby delaying the process.
On PS I delete spammers without mercy, delay, or consultation of any sort !
If an established member deserved being banned, this is a more serious matter and would require some " behind the scenes" consultation, not a hasty action by one person.
But for spammers, no need !

And your work is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Why not fight fire with fire and hassle any company that advertising with Spam? Post a warning on the sign-up page stating 'If you spam our forum on behalf of a company, board members will repeatedly troll that company'.

How about ringing up asking about a kitchen then saying 'haha, twats!'.

Or something more childish?

It may be an automatic thing so nobody will ever read a message we place.

Thanks, it takes a little time but is not hard.

Another unrelated forum that I know of has a huge problem with spam, largely kitchen adverts at present, though fake medicines and designer goods also feature.
IMHO, the owners of that site dont get the idea of an internet forum ! the procedure for "expelling a member" is very convoluted and needs a vote. The site rules seem to be based on the constitution of say a village sporting club or a local political club or society and not on the rather different needs of an internet forum.
In the case of say a local sporting or political club, many of the members know each other, and a vote among the commitee, or even the entire membership might be reasonable before someone can be expelled.

In the case of an internet forum, then most would accept that spammers should be deleted forthwhith without vote, argument, delay, or consultation of any form.
Whilst I can in fact delete or ban ANY member of these forums, I would not delete any established member without input from the original admin team.

I once successfully sold a kitchen. I was actually just a bunch of surplus-to-requirements units for 30 quid in our local paper, but because I included the "make and model" info in the ad, someone found a perfect match and bought it ("for the conservatory")

adam2 wrote:Thanks, it takes a little time but is not hard.

Another unrelated forum that I know of has a huge problem with spam, largely kitchen adverts at present, though fake medicines and designer goods also feature.
IMHO, the owners of that site dont get the idea of an internet forum ! the procedure for "expelling a member" is very convoluted and needs a vote. The site rules seem to be based on the constitution of say a village sporting club or a local political club or society and not on the rather different needs of an internet forum.
In the case of say a local sporting or political club, many of the members know each other, and a vote among the commitee, or even the entire membership might be reasonable before someone can be expelled.

In the case of an internet forum, then most would accept that spammers should be deleted forthwhith without vote, argument, delay, or consultation of any form.
Whilst I can in fact delete or ban ANY member of these forums, I would not delete any established member without input from the original admin team.

Ditto. We've only had a couple of conversations about expelling members in my time as a Mod.

On sites I manage (Drupal and Wordpress) I use Mollom:

http://mollom.com/features

When new content is analyzed by Mollom's intelligent text-analysis filter, and Mollom is unsure whether it is ham or spam, it asks the user to answer a CAPTCHA challenge. This challenge-response procedure will never block human users, and it allows us to set very tight spam filters and prevent almost all spam from getting through.

Free up to 50 legitimate posts/day

It has a PHP plugin so could be made to work on PS, not sure how much work it would be though.