How to Report Spam in Forums

m78w · #1 02-22-2009, 08:00 AM

Hi Everyone,
There has been a rise in spammers posting junk in our forum lately. If you see anything that is an ad for something not related to guitar, or absolutely inappropriate, then please report it to the moderators and we can delete the post and band the poster.

Just click on the red triangle with the ! in it, found in the upper right side of the post box. That notifies the moderators so we can take care of the post.

The site has remained pretty clean up until now, but it seems spammers are kicking it into overdrive, so we all appreciate your help in reporting these bozos.

MW

hot ford coupe · #2 02-22-2009, 03:49 PM

No problem. We had the same problem over on my own site. It drives me nuts.

trtjazz · #3 02-22-2009, 04:07 PM

There's a quick way to solve it actually as I did at the Tascam forums, where we were flooded with spam at one point now there's zero.

m78w · #4 02-22-2009, 04:09 PM

Hey Terry,
If you have any suggestions we'd love to hear them, spammers are a HUGE pain in the butt around here.

MW

trtjazz · #5 02-22-2009, 04:20 PM

It's unpoplular but became necessary at Tascam. We put in a $1.00 lifetime membership fee, using paypal. Most really did not mind if you give enough advanced notice that it's going to happen, because one day they come to sign in and can't until they re-register and pay the $1.00. It stopped ALL spam overnight and helped to defer the forum costs as well, which is not unreasonable.
Part of the ramifications on the backside is that there are spam members that sit in member validating, which gave me the opportunity to then get the Edresses and put in ban filters for those domains like @rxpills.com or whatever and now after about 6 months there's rarely anyone ever in validating anymore the ban filters dump them.
I also put up contact info in a thread in the event someone was trying to get in and couldn't unjustly they could E me and I would put them in manually.
Spammers don't pay to spam and they don't have paypal accounts, it's generated automatically to go out to certain types of bulletin boards this type being one of them.

m78w · #6 03-01-2009, 09:20 AM

I don't know if charging people would work here, but if things get bad that's definitely something to consider. Things seem to have calmed down a bit in the last few weeks, so hopefully spammers are getting the hint that this is the wrong place to hang out!

MW

trtjazz · #7 03-01-2009, 01:14 PM

You missed the other morning, there were 3 spam posts in every section that got deleted.

trtjazz · #8 03-11-2009, 05:59 AM

The other thing you might consider is if the forum has a captcha feature. You know where one has to put in the K6f8747 (or whatever) code to post. Although I must say I hate those.

604bourne123 · #9 04-02-2010, 02:45 PM

trying to keep a train of thought on music is hard to do without being distracted

billkath · #10 04-02-2010, 03:26 PM

The Captcha thing is not really any good. The people who send out the bots have a team of people that only enter numbers into Captcha. Of course-all the adverts are placed by robots, once they are granted membership. Guess what? The people entering the Captchas can not read English. What I did for my forum is I added one extra question on signup-"What is the last letter of the word "Spammer"?" . I made it so that if you just double click the answer box the default answer is S. Of course, they are denied membership then. They do NOT try to break this-time is money and their are lots of forums not protected. This has cut our spam down to nearly zero, and cost nothing. We also moderate the first post of new members-it shows up to moderators but not the general users. This is to stop the individual retailer who can read. If we do find a spam message we delete it, after adding the member to the banned list.

We use the same software and version number as you do. If you want our "banned" list, which has the IP addresses of thousands of these spammers e-mail suffixes, just ask. I'm happy to help if I can.

604bourne123 · #11 04-02-2010, 04:58 PM

my spams come through the e-mail address go to a thread they advertise then you go to the forum and there is no trace of the post so they no how to go to your e-mail address go to three or four lessons notify you that you are subscribed to a thread advertise-two companies than you go to answer they have gone with no trace at the forum. So

billkath · #12 05-06-2010, 05:46 AM

Irony