Does spam on this forum annoy you?

[TonyW]

Is it just me or does anyone else get annoyed about spam on this and other forums?

Just logged on and found a new member "clothes" posting spam. The little jerk has made 33 posts so far!!

I know that the mods will remove the offending items soon, but should we just ignore it in the meantime or perhaps try something to dissuade the poster?

For example what about us all sending a nonsense email to the contact address shown or even an invoice charging for the reading of this rubbish. There are over 2000 members on this forum and if only 50% took action I doubt that we would get the company trying to post again

Cheers
Tony

 

[JackL]

:twisted: I'm with you Tony. It's a pity that we can't attach explosives to e-mails to blow his computer out of sight.

 

[bjm]

I just assume that anyone who has to resort to spam obviously hasn't got anything of any real value to sell so the best option is to just ignore them.

Brian

 

[Philly]

Apologies - I've removed the spam and the "user". Spam is a real PITA and serves no genuine purpose :evil:
Cheers
Philly

 

[Woodmagnet]

:evil: I hate spam and spammers :evil:

 

[Smudger]

Scum. Can't even spell Lacoste.

I wonder if he does Burberry chisel rolls?

 

[Anonymous]

Apologies - I've removed the spam and the "user". Spam is a real PITA and serves no genuine purpose :evil:
Cheers
Philly

Unfortuantely, this is not true (for the spammers anyway). I heard a discussion on radio 4 a while back and they had evidence that some idiots do click through and buy items. Their example was a site selling 'size enhancement' :wink: for men and the company were buying in some rubbish for £5, selling it on for £50 +P&P, and they already had over 100,000 sales!!!

There must be a lot of desperate/dumb people out there

 

[TonyW]

Thanks Philly. Must be difficult to monitor this type of user/member 24/7. Still think Charley should send them an invoice for free advertising

Cheers
Tony

 

[RogerS]

Is it just me or does anyone else get annoyed about spam on this and other forums?

Just logged on and found a new member "clothes" posting spam. The little jerk has made 33 posts so far!!

I know that the mods will remove the offending items soon, but should we just ignore it in the meantime or perhaps try something to dissuade the poster?

For example what about us all sending a nonsense email to the contact address shown or even an invoice charging for the reading of this rubbish. There are over 2000 members on this forum and if only 50% took action I doubt that we would get the company trying to post again

Cheers
Tony

Much as I'd like to think that it would work, I don't think it will as most of these spam emails come from forged email addresses (well, real addresses but not the originating spammers address) and probably sent from an account that isn't monitored or read.

Now if you really want to get serious then organise a DDoS attack...but that requires loads and loads of PCs to be effective.

I worked out that my email address is now 20 years old! Which perhaps explains why I get a fair bit of spam but to be fair to demon, their filtering is pretty damn good. I used to get a couple of 100 a day (which were filtered by my own spam filter) but then demon improved their set up and it's reduced to virtual nothing.

For new members, I can't remember ...does Charlie ask you to enter in the characters that you see in a little window? That seems to me to be a good way to beat robotic spammers.

Occasionally when I get asked to enter in all my bank password details with a bank where I don't have an account I do take a childish delight in filling in the fields with suitable profanities and epithets tailored to the originating country. I know you're not supposed to but I'm pretty bullet proof here behind my routers and firewalls and Mac!

 

[TonyW]

Much as I'd like to think that it would work, I don't think it will as most of these spam emails come from forged email addresses (well, real addresses but not the originating spammers address) and probably sent from an account that isn't monitored or read.

For new members, I can't remember ...does Charlie ask you to enter in the characters that you see in a little window? That seems to me to be a good way to beat robotic spammers.

Interesting thoughts Roger. On your first point about forged email addresses. This particular spammer listed both hotmail and yahoo as contact addresses, to me this suggested a small company. I assume that someone would have to check these accounts for orders etc - just the fact of so many nonsense replies may well persuade the people responsible to remove this forum from their "hit list". Of course it would require that we set up a disposable email account (Hotmail or Yahoo etc) to prevent unwanted return spam

On your second point, I do not think that there is the facility to enter characters when joining this forum - at least this was the case when I joined.

Cheers
Tony

 

[devonwoody]

Apologies - I've removed the spam and the "user". Spam is a real PITA and serves no genuine purpose :evil:
Cheers
Philly

Unfortuantely, this is not true (for the spammers anyway). I heard a discussion on radio 4 a while back and they had evidence that some idiots do click through and buy items. Their example was a site selling 'size enhancement' :wink: for men and the company were buying in some rubbish for £5, selling it on for £50 +P&P, and they already had over 100,000 sales!!!

There must be a lot of desperate/dumb people out there

Those spammers are not very good sales directors, I would offer men available at £50 each. I would need an active sales staff tho.

 

[White House Workshop]

The problem with replying to any spam is that the spammer now has a verified email address - and that is worth money to him/her.

 

[Gerry]

This forum software PHPBB is notorious for it's poor security as a result just about every PHPBB forum suffers from abuse like this. There are plenty of better, easily customisable forum software available free such as SMF

Gerry

 

[Charley]

As Roger says, I doubt we'll get very far trying to contact the spammers directly

This forum software PHPBB is notorious for it's poor security as a result just about every PHPBB forum suffers from abuse like this. There are plenty of better, easily customisable forum software available free such as SMF

We've actually installed a custom add-on which has stopped the spambots from signing up (touch wood). The latest spammer we had was a real person and unfortunately there's not much we can do about them signing up apart from blocking the IP..

 

[Losos]

There must be a lot of desperate/dumb people out there

There are without doubt millions upon millions of dumb and gullible people around.

How else could the advertising world get away with the outrageous claims they make on a daily basis.

In recent years I have adopted the 80:20 rule which was published in some eminent scientific journal a long time ago, (Relating to physics IIRC,) it works quite well with humans. Take any public place with 100 people in it, e.g. a railway station, 80 of those people are going to be idiots, crooks, dumbos, illerates etc etc. Only 20 are likely to have any brains :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: