I know its hard to stop this sort of thing, but with the amount if crap that keeps getting posted at the moment it really puts me off.
Does anyone else find this?
And can anything be done? Perhaps a registration that needs to be approved before its fully active.
I lurked on here for ages before registering and I’m sure people still do this. I’d hate to think all the spam puts people off from registering as it possibly would have stopped me and I can’t be the only person in the world to think that way.
I think they’re kind of interesting. The ones that generate sort of English-sounding gibberish that is good enough to fool a spam filter are very similar to a project I did in college. I didn’t know I was being trained to write spambots.
TBH though, most spam posts here have a massive block of links at the bottom. It wouldn’t be too hard to filter these out or put a captcha on the ‘new thread’ form.
I’ve been using this forum for many years, and the amount of spam has increased very significantly recently. It is an irritant in that the interesting threads have to be picked out from among the spam threads, but it is not a major problem.
Given that there is no charge for using the forum (although you can make donations) and given that the moderators are volunteers, I don’t think we should complain.
However, every forum user who replies to a spam thread even once is adding to the problem by encouraging it. We can’t stop the corrupt and criminal activity that generates spam, but we don’t have to help them.
And yes, it is corrupt and criminal. Spam relies on concealing the true identity of the sender, and selling by telling lies to millions in the hope that some will believe and pay. Where do you think the profits go?
