Spam policy

[Jamin]

In the topic about yesterdays mass pm'ing of members by XandderrMan that contained a link that could have been harmful, Liberator posted a new name that had just registered called ForumTeam, I checked him out by ip address and found that ip had joined several forums and pm'd members with the message and a link, so I banned her.

The things that bother me are:

• Out of four people that have joined up since Feb 1st, three look suspect.


• The above mentioned spammers posted harmful links, is this a new trend forming?.


• Some members who received the pm couldn't spot spam and a few clicked the link :doh:

I've searched the site but can't find any info on dealing with spammers so opened up this topic to see what, if any the policy is.

[smilodon]

No it's not new. We fight spammers on an almost daily basis. I think we get at least one or two a day and sometimes more.

The usual process is for us to check their name,e-mail and IP against the Stop Forum Spam database. Fortunately most of these spammers seem to have a delay between registering and posting spam, so we can ban them before anyone notices. However the PM spammer that hit us yesterday had an ICQ number and a date of birth which made them look a little more legitimate than normal. Therefore I didn't check them out immediately and they were able to hit us all with PM spam.

However VB4 will have the option to automatically check a new member against the Stop Forum Spam database as they sign up nand this should automate much of the banning we do.