SPAM and spammers

[smokie]

You will have noticed a spate of spamming recently on this forum.

Firstly, I would like to apologise if anyone has found it offensive in any way. We have been doing our best to remove it as soon as possible, and would encourage you to use the Report button (which sends the mods an email) on any new instances so will get dealt with more quickly.

To try to reduce the interference from these low life we have introduced some changes to the way the board operates. If somene registers they will have to receive and act upon an automated email to activate their registration before they can post. This might prevent any 'bot postings, and deter any casual spammers.

More importantly, there is now a 20 second ban between posts from the same IP address. I doubt that many of us ever try to post more than once in 20 seconds but you may get an error message if you do.

Hopefully this will stop the spamming activity which is disruptive, offensive, onerous, and generally a Bad Thing. There are some slightly higher levels of security which could be imposed (particularly around registration) but they would start to become intrusive so are unlikely to be implemented.

[smokie]

Hopefully this will stop the spamming activity....

Unfortunately it didn't, we got another hit today. So it looks like we will have to put up with this behaviour.

[Steve Pyro]

Thanks to those that continue to 'Report to Moderator' when we are hit with a spam post / thread.

We endeavour to act as soon as possible and usually ban the user and IP address hosting the user.

The modified new user registration seems to be working.  The 'un-activated username' list seems to be getting longer, indicating that spammers are opening new user accounts, but not completing the necessary account activation - hence they won't be able to post.

[smokie]

...and we get notification of New Members so if they look suspect I am deleting the username and blocking IP etc  before they even get to use it.

btw did anyone save a copy of today's film?