A new Forum rule.

Posts about aliens coming to Earth will not be allowed.

People making their first post must say something at least vaguely connected to Theosophy. People who make their first post about a product will be banned.

Hello Nick

These guys are spammers they could care less about your Forum or its topic Theosophy.

These people are using some kind of Bot program or forum Auto spammer like that Xrumer some people I saw was testing by posting on your forum by asking a question if anybody was aware of [edited]. I did a search of this certain text file it was showing up in a lot of other Forums with these Clowns or the [edited] is posting a message by asking about [edited] as a test by the software [edited]. It does increase the search engine hits to a target word like a product name by spamming the search engines like google.

It seems to me Spam lately is a very serious problem with many Forum Administrators.
http://www.conradaskland.com/blog/2006/11/...-black-hat-seo/

One Forum Administrator I know of if he suspects they are spamers will not validate them as a members but will not delete them so they can not sign up again and he doesn't let them look at the members list as feedback. I am not to sure how effective he is with this but he was bit fustrated at one time but had his fun with them by making fun of them on his site in a way by making fun of them as losers and not being very spiritual by trying to make a large amount of money at peoples expense and time through deception that is spammers are two faced and are thinking about nothing else but themselfs and not the other guys well being.

So these spammers who are trying to make some bucks on a product or a service at your expense Nick and they will simply walk all over you. And they are trying to make money at your members expense as well.

I am not sure what the answer is to these annoying spammers. I dont know of how successfull you would be in getting their IP and using a trace program to report their spamming activities and file a complaint to their Internet Service Provider and having the spammers account revoked as result of your complaint.

As we all know their are all kinds of despicable people on the internet using your Email to try to even steal your Identity via Phishing using fake websites to get sensitive personal info from you that look legit but the link is suspicious since all the real sites say they would never request such personal info by Email. All kinds of Spyware, Viruses and Hacking attempts on ones computer unless you have taken the necessary steps to protect yourself but nothing is 100 percent (Back doors in the software) their are always holes no matter how much they try to protect the internet user.

But your the Administrator of this Forum and I am a guest so I leave that up to you of how to handle these spammers.


Doug

Yes, Soverign, it was from a spammer. I only posted this warning, so that I can ban people and delete their posts without warning them. (I believe in due process — even for spammers!)

Whenever I do such a banning, I always do a google search first. I can always find evidence of their spamming on other websites. Thus, my banning is justified.

Regarding what to do about spammers, I take the "open" approach: Rather than making it difficult for spammers to post, I keep posting easy for both spammers and human beings. Later, I just delete the spam posts. It seems the best way to handle it.

Regarding the name of the offending product the spammer was trying to advedrtise, I have edited the name of the product from your post! I did so, in order not to "increase the search engine hits to a target word like a product name by spamming the search engines like google" as you noted. I hope you understand.

You said,

"One Forum Administrator I know of if he suspects they are spamers will not validate them as a members but will not delete them so they can not sign up again and he doesn't let them look at the members list as feedback."


It is a difficult decision, whether or not to keep the spammers' names in the list of members. I choose not to, as I do not want keep such disgusting names in the list. Also, spammers generally use a name only once, and spam with a different name later on. (I believe banning their IP address is more effectve, although I am not sure about that.)

Hi Nick

No Problem. I understand where you are comming from. :D

If you read the above link about the lattest tool of the spammers you understand the slick way they are trying to get the members of a forum to provide a link to the spammers website by asking a question of where to find a product via their Bot Auto submitting program that is doing a massive forum posting with these questions of asking where they can find the product in question.

Since the members or administrators would add the link to the website after searching on an search engine like google where this website is. Alot of people have fallen for this. And as a result a massively increase in search engine hits. Very sneaky.

Doug

Initial posts that contain links to non-Theosophical webpages are not allowed, and will get you banned.