Hi there good people. Why am I beginning to feel this forum is becoming the target of spammers? There have been 2 postings lately that have turned out to be spam. As some members would know I'm not the sharpest technological tool in the shed which is why I consulted with Ms Woko, my good wife & chief household hitech expert, about my uneasy feeling. She took one look at one of the postings & began shaking uncontrollably, a clear sign that all was not well.
I'm wondering what safeguards we have in place @ (see, I'm not all that technologically illiterate) present & whether anything else needs to or can be done to prevent spammers from raining on our parade. Or am I, as my sharebroker keeps telling me, needlessly worrying?
Woko
I keep an eye on every post that appears on the forum but if something concerns you, email me:
- and I delete anything spam-like. We are still working with old technology but the new one will stop all the spam coming in on the most part. I apologise for how long it is taking, the new forum is actually ready to go but the rest of the site isn't, and thats with me, I am still migrating content over to the new one. Unfortunately my role away from the website is also huge and some pressing things have kept me from it for the last couple of weeks.
Finally - never click a link that you are unsure of, if you are suspicious, just let me know :)
Cheers
Holly
LOL Woko,I should be kept in the same shed as you? Because I'm kept in that shed , I can smell a rat for miles. Those spammers get more and more clever!! The new trend could be , to ask a clever bird question, like ,what bird sings at night,click on to this link. And bang, you will get lots of junk mail, or some virus.Guess, we all have to use our instincts more, if it suspiciously smells like a rat, it probably is!!!
M-L
Spam posts aren't hard to pick out, always a new member and generally a load of garbage with a bunch of hyperlinks stuck throughout the post. Just don't click any links and it should be all good. Holly just wondering how the new forum technology will prevent spam?
I will have to get the new web guys to pop in and answer that! There will be a more secure registration though - so people will have to enter a code that appears on the screen (alot of sites do that now) so a person rather than a computer generated bot has to read it.
Hmmm... captchas are overrated, IMHO. Sure, they stop computer-generated attacks, but they need to be used wisely. They frequently are not.
Just as an example, I pay bills through a site that has a captcha requirement. It is utterly pointless (have you ever seen a computer hacker trying to randomly pay money to someone?) and all it does is inconvenience the customer.
- soakes
soakes
Olinda, Victoria, Australia
Thanks Holly et al. I can see that I need to be alert but not alarmed. My spam sniffer is improving, I think, & my cautionary principle will be on full display. Ms Woko is coaching me well, too.
Don't feel too bad about it.
I moderate on a couple of forums, one gets about 30-40 spam posts a day and the other big one would be over 100 a day. There are quite a few moderators on that one.
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All are human generated these days and almost impossible to control. If you put too many hurdles for them to jump over, you will also deter any genuine people wishing to join the forum.
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The latest is signature spam, where links are put into the signature and they then reply to posts. The link in the signature is then picked up by the searchbots.