Spam
BruceAF
| Posted in General Questions on
This spam is getting very annoying… What is GBA doing to correct this issue.
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Replies
Bruce,
Like you, I find the spam very annoying. According to our tech specialists, the Taunton servers that host GBA are preventing (for reasons that are unclear to me) the existing spam control from being updated. The current solution chosen by our tech specialists is to move all of the GBA site off the Taunton servers onto exterior servers, so that the exterior servers will provide spam filtering.
That process has started, and this week is being used to test the stability of GBA on the new servers. If the tests are successful, the fix will go live in about a week.
In the meantime, every spam that is posted on GBA needs to be deleted one at a time by me. I started clearing the spam yesterday morning (Sunday) at 4:30 a.m., and by late afternoon I had deleted 161 spam posts. So the spam posting rate is now at about 15 sph (spams per hour).
Martin,
Is there anything we can do to help with the spam problem? Particularly using YOU to manually delete the spam. I know the regular readers of this website value your time and knowledge and we don't think you should be the one doing that work - now or anytime in the future.
Isn't there some computer geek low man on the totem pole who could do this?
Thank you for all you do to maintain this website.
Or low woman on the totem pole. Did not mean to be sexist.
Lucy,
Thanks for your kind words and offer of help.
Hopefully we'll have a better technical fix soon. GBA may get an innovation (a button to click) that allows readers to report spam.
I don't mean to be an armchair webmaster here, but it seems like a CAPTCHA would solve the problem pretty easily.
I have to say, this message board software is about worst of any I use.
It is often down, when I come her and see no posts I just go somewhere else, it may be days before it is back
What about Yuku?
or vbulletin
I post on both daily and they have no spam and rare outages
As a software engineer that once wrote software that automatically promoted websites (by doing similar automatic submission techniques that - I am sure - the spammers are using), one quick and easy technique for resolving the issue would be to slightly change the form field names such that the automated submission does not know how to post automatically anymore (until the spammers correct it).
This should/could only take a few minutes for a software guy and would eliminate the spam for some period of time.
Chris
The weekend Spamfest has begun
Choir (intervening):
Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!
Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!
Spam spa-a-a-a-a-am spam spa-a-a-a-a-am spam.
Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!
Spam spam spam spam!
...
John,
Sorry that it seems to bother you. It's true that I sometimes take a one-hour or two-hour break on weekends.
Just for the record, spam is way down this weekend. Last Sunday, I deleted 138 spam postings between 4:30 am and 1:30 pm. Today's deletions for the comparable time period: only 21.