The forum spam situation

I think anything and everything is worth trying just to get rid of these idiots. I know it's not a sensible alternative, but I would love to re-pay the compliment by sending them a squillion nonesense emails just for the hell of it..! I know it can't be done but it sure would be fun........!

One quirk of this board that might be making it easier for them is that it seem like you can change the subject line part way through a thread. Like the addition to this threads title. Im keeping an eye on this as Im a moderator on another forum which also fights a running battle with spammers. Interestingly my spammers are from the Philipines not Russia and do a reasonable attempt at English.

Don't know the technicalities, and I'm sure it's not easy by any means, but whatever it takes, lets get rid of these cybertwats....! They're spoiling a great site............infact they're spoiling the bloody planet by thieving oxygen.....!

yes normclimb i agree its a pain,i used the mirosoft translater and it seems they are talking about kits for poker games and electronic cigerettes [ no idea what that is about ] my work had a problem a while ago with spam and the IT guy did come up with a fix. We were getting spam in every language except english i think it was a filter that blocked everything excapt english it took a while to work it out he is on holiday for 2 weeks i will ask him when he gets back to work Lindsay

Matthew, is it easy to adjust this method so spam messages can be flagged from the various index pages? I used to flag them quite often, but I've found that now with so many of them and the need to click into each conversation, I'm not bothering as much. Thanks for putting the time and effort into working on this. If it's not effective in the longer term, I wonder if it could be an option to pipe the content of every post through a tool like SpamAssassin to determine if it's likely to be spam. http://spamassassin.apache.org/ , if you have that much control over what runs on the server at least. That way it's hopefully just a case of keeping a specialist product up-to-date rather than trying to keep up with the multitude of ways spammers change things to avoid detection.

Ive just flagged an english spam message. There would be a cost in both access and bandwidth to go through a service like spam assasin. Another option would be to increase the number of moderators with the ability to kill posts. Nothings perfect

Hi geeves. There shouldn't be a cost -- it's a free open source program that can be run on a host server (like the web server). It'd depend though on things server configurations and the ability to get the website to pipe new posts through the app and see whether it thinks something's spam. Obviously it'd also depend on Matthew's thoughts and whether it's worth trying, and no spam solution will be perfect.

Something.....anything....the bastards have just struck again. Can't we put back that bloody iron curtain......?

Is this site of any use? http://www.stopforumspam.com/ Just wish I was computer savvy.