I reported a bunch of it but i lost steam before I got to all of it.

I wrote this tongue-in-cheek blog piece about this subject a little over a year ago.

One solution might be for long-time trusted members who tend to be on the forum daily to have the ability to take a post or thread off-line, making it automatically come to the attention of the administrator, who can in turn override that decision.

craigslist.org has a "flagging" system whereby if a certain number of people click a button on a post it is automatically removed by the system without an administrator even toiching his computer.

Hey guys

Sadly, the only option right now is to just report to moderator. I'm the only one with internet access at the moment so I can't catch them instantly, but I'm trying This morning I had almost 50 "report to moderator" messages in my PM's to contend with, so it takes a bit of time to filter through them all and get things sorted (I make sure to find all of their user posts, delete them, delete their account, etc).

Thanks for reporting the spam, the sooner you do the better and I'll try to get them gone as soon as possible, and since I'm not active in all areas of the forum it's very helpful for you folks to report it as soon as you see it.

As for the spammers, does anyone actually follow their links?? I'm not sure what they really gain from this stuff honestly, aside from frustrating forum users that is. The sad part is that there is an application that spammers can buy that get's around the security on just about any modern forum software (this is how they are doing it, they are not email validating and going through the full procedure).

Once Michael is back I'll discuss some options with him on how to combat this stuff.

Mark

I use View New Posts as my bookmark for the forum. This reveals all spam as well as being generally useful to stay on top of multiple discussion areas.

Me too. A favorites or links button with this URL will take you straight to it:

http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....rch&CODE=getnew

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net

This always seems to happen when MR is away, how the hell do they know?

It happens when MR is around too, he's just pretty fast to get rid of it

I sent a spam report in an email to Neil yesterday. Is Neil not also moderating? (I forgot - perhaps he is still off in Thailand?)

One idea you can discuss with Michael (similar to what Jonathan suggested) - if technically possible on this platform - have a SPAM folder with an automatic intercept and add a "SPAM" button to the interface. This way any user who presses the SPAM button for a post would relegate that post to the SPAM folder and all further posts from that source go into the SPAM folder. This is the system that Rogers Cable (using Yahoo Mail) has here in Toronto and it works beautifully. I very seldom find spam amongst the emails I need to read. With email each client has a spam folder, so here the idea would be modified for the site to hold the spam folder.

Could such a system be open to abuse by existing member, though? One doesn't like a particular post so one hits the 'spam' button. Of course, I realise that no one could get away with that for long. They'd eventually be expelled from the site, but perhaps not before some damage had been done.

The solution to that is to set a threshold so X number of members have to click the spam button before the post disappears and the poster is quarantined. If you set X to 10 or so, it would be hard for abusers to improperly flag a post, but legitimate spammers would still disappear quickly.

These are good suggestions, but unfortunately none of them are supported by the forum software we use. I've made some modifications that seem to have at least slowed the spam posts for now.

Mark

The obvious solution is to go where others have gone before:

Captcha

While this is a slight nuisance for human posters, it's harder to automate against.

One important usability aspect is to allow humans to ask for a different captcha text if they can't read the first one.

It's also smart to use different captcha styles, so that two captchas of the same text don't look similar at all. The Wikipedia article provides examples of two such different styles.

Good suggestion jani, but the software these spammers are using bypasses this stuff already.

Hi folks

Have been off the circuit for a while with poor health - yeah, I know, nobody noticed - so could someone please bring me up to speed about what's been going on with spam?

Ciao - Rob C

How do you detect or discover SPAM in order to report it?

Regards
Danijela

Sorry to hear you have not been well Rob. Hope you are on the mend.
With regard to spam - there have been heaps of posts to various forum sections from first time posters, within a few minutes of registering, posting lengthy advertisements. Often the subject header is close enough to being on topic, but sometimes just the subject header has been enough to identify it as spam.

Julie

Julie

Thanks for the good wishes - not 100% repaired yet but getting there, I think.

I hadn't noticed the spam, perhaps because I have a fairly limited number of stopping-off places on this site, being more interested in the general art of photography rather than in the minutia of technique and new equipment. This isn't a criticism of anybody - it's just that as I've been earning my living from this business since 1960 I am far less excited by new products and new ways of skinning the same cat. What I appreciate more is the odd insight into what makes another photographer want to do what he does. I also enjoy seeing other's work (noun) and that's one of the great benefits of the internet - you get the chance to do just that.

Take care - Rob C

Oh, the irony.

One site that I frequent uses a category called "trusted users". I'm not sure what their criteria is, they keep that private. Trusted users can troll rate a post.

Other TUs can see that there's a hidden troll rated post in the thread and view it if they wish. That means that there is a potential for questioning a bad call.

You might want to talk to the software designers to see if they can add a feature to deal with the spam problem.