Att Admin

[Linuxmutt]

Received the following PM from some spammer.

Moderator: spam deleted.

[dimesio]

DO NOT REPOST SPAM PUBLICLY. By reposting it here, you are accomplishing what the original spammer couldn't: getting past moderation.

Report spam PMs privately. This one was reported by multiple people, and the sender has been banned.

[jnewman]

I've disabled the private messaging system. There really is not a need for it here. If you need to contact someone privately, you can find a way to do it outside of the forum.

[Linuxmutt]

DO NOT REPOST SPAM PUBLICLY. By reposting it here, you are accomplishing what the original spammer couldn't: getting past moderation.

Report spam PMs privately. This one was reported by multiple people, and the sender has been banned.

wow you seem excited over a little spam, YOU REALLY think any user of this site would follow that spam haha

Your running PHPBB no? You can delete the user all their post, private messages everything in a few clicks, you could have deleted this thread after reading it with two clicks....

[Linuxmutt]

I've disabled the private messaging system. There really is not a need for it here. If you need to contact someone privately, you can find a way to do it outside of the forum.

Your right we can just create new topics and exchange emails addresses in public where bots can harvest, great plan, a better plan would be to delete these forums and show the bots and spammers who is really boss

Been using forums since 1991 am a member of dozens of forums never seen this level of paranoia over a little spam before...

[Linuxmutt]

In the admin control panel under Spambot Countermeasures you can ask a question at sign up.

On my site your asked to Type the middle 4 characters of G*^n3= in the box : haven't had a spambot yet.

[dimesio]

wow you seem excited over a little spam, YOU REALLY think any user of this site would follow that spam haha

Your running PHPBB no? You can delete the user all their post, private messages everything in a few clicks, you could have deleted this thread after reading it with two clicks....

I am perfectly aware that I could have just deleted this thread. Since we still had PM capability at the time I responded, I chose to leave it to warn other users not to repeat your utter stupidity.

I don't expect our users to follow spam. I do expect spammers to follow how effective their strategies are in getting spam on the forum.

We are already using the challenge question to stop spambots from registering. It is less effective in stopping human spammers; for that we have forced moderation for new users.

Here's what you don't see: spam posts stopped in moderation outnumber legitimate posts. Most of my time moderating is spent dealing with spammers behind the scenes so everyone here can have a nice, spam-free forum. So when I see a user who has made it past the forced moderation period intentionally subvert the spam controls, I don't just get a "little excited," I get royally pissed off. And yes, I do mean intentionally: you were one of the 22 people who reported that message using the report message feature of the board, so clearly you knew about it and how to use it. There was absolutely no valid reason for you to repost that spam publicly.