The Plague of Spam

[Michael Fanelli]

The spam being posted on the site lately is getting really annoying. Although I used to hate the following suggestion, it might just work: require that each new member provide a "real" email address, no free account addresses (hotmail, yahoo, etc.). They do this over on "that other digital photo web site" and spam is not an issue there. This is not all that intrusive and makes repeat spammers almost impossible to create.

What do y'all think?

[opus]

How does one enforce that? And what about people whose "real" address is AOL, Yahoo, or Hotmail? Some people don't have much money to spend on dedicated email.


Just a question. I like the idea if it is indeed do-able.

[Photo-John]

Michael-
I don't want to restrict access to the site any more than we already have. There are some very justifiable reasons to use Hot Mail or Yahoo acccounts when resgitering for a Web site. Plus, I think we've been pretty good about eliminating the spam posts quickly. In the big picture, the amount of spam we have here is tiny. Plus, I sort of consider it a sign of success

[Lara]

Spamming has been particularly more abundant the past few weeks, but certainly not out of control. I deleted a bunch yesterday and quite a few this morning, as have our moderators. The batch yesterday came from the same person who for some strange reason took the time to register 3 times. The source, New Delhi! Go figure.

[Peter_AUS]

As long as people keep reporting the posts when they see them, so someone can delete them quickly that will cut down on the frustrations. I report all posts that I think are spam and leave it up to the forum moderator/administrator do make the decision about what is spam on that forum. I delete what I think is spam on the website design forum I moderate as I think is necessary. Sometimes I leave one and see what others think about certain posts, there is one there at present that I am watching, I consider it spam, but thought I would leave it just for the time being.

Another thing that concerns me lately, is new members that have been raising old posts with nothing more to add generally to the thread. Is this just a ploy by them to get their posting counts up a bit to look more legitimate.

[another view]

This site has been really good about deleting spam quickly. Actually, I got a PM awhile back from a member complementing us on how we take care of it - he's a moderator on another site. I think it's still going to happen no matter what regardless of who the email account is thru - though maybe not as much if you eliminated the hotmail addresses, etc.

And it's not all new posts, either. There was one person recently who found five threads with a lot of activity, and posted a reply in each saying something like "check this site for more information" and the site had nothing to do with photography (at least not adult content!). We got those out very fast and Lara suspended their ID.

Life on the web...

[Arctirus]

It's not just this forum that's been getting a lot of spam lately. I've been seeing basically the same posts on some computer hardware forums I post on.