This is not a pretty sight

[Ray]

There must be some way of dealing with people who join a site like this in order to advertise their products. I know we can't boil them in oil or slowly remove their finger nails, but there must be some appropriately harsh treatment.

Oops! Too slow in my complaint. I see it's already been fixed   .

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Right on, Ray!

When I saw all the mess when clicking on "View New Posts", this time I thought to look at the real posts first, and then click on "Mark all posts as read" to get rid of the garbage.

I heartily thank our forum admins for taking out the trash so promptly.  

[michael]

There really isn't any way to keep these people out.

We use a registration process that requires that people send us their real email address, and then we send a confirmation, but this only serves to slow them down a bit.

We could change the board so that all posting required an administrator approval, but that would be tedious and too much work.

Interestingly, almost all of these forum spams come from IP addresses located in Rumania.

Michael

[Bobtrips]

There really isn't any way to keep these people out.

We use a registration process that requires that people send us their real email address, and then we send a confirmation, but this only serves to slow them down a bit.

We could change the board so that all posting required an administrator approval, but that would be tedious and too much work.

Interestingly, almost all of these forum spams come from IP addresses located in Rumania.

Michael
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=75559\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

One site that I visit has a class of members called "Trusted Users".  TUs have the ability to squash posts/posters that are flagrantly in violation of the terms of service.

That means that those type of posts disappear quite rapidly and those posters vaporize before they can creat very much damage.

(There are some fancy ways that this process works if you're interested.)

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

From what I've seen here, I don't think LL needs to change its procedures. When junk shows up, either Michael or Chris seems to nip it pretty quickly. Note that by the time Ray posted the very first complaint, the spam posts were already gone. That's pretty nice service IMHO.

[oldcsar]

i agree with how the spam is removed pretty quickly. whenever i see it, i just click the report button... i'm sure when people report, it speeds up the process.

[TomConnor]

Interestingly, almost all of these forum spams come from IP addresses located in Rumania.

It could always be a bot at work.  I don’t know the Invision forums very well, but an obvious way to deal with bots in something like PHP BB would be to require all users to be members of a usergroup (to access forums and post), but, then again, from what I have seen of the forum up to now, spam doesn’t seem to be a serious problem, so it almost certainly isn’t worth the effort (at least, not yet).

[jani]

There must be some way of dealing with people who join a site like this in order to advertise their products. I know we can't boil them in oil or slowly remove their finger nails, but there must be some appropriately harsh treatment.

Yes.

19th century dentist's chair and tools. Give me immunity and leave me alone with them for a few hours, or more if I'm enjoying myself.

The problem with spam like this is that it pays for the spammer. As long as one idiot out of 10,000 gives them money, they're making very good money.

You can add "captchas" (the weird little images with almost-unreadable text you have to input) and add several hoops to jump through in order to post, but the spammers can basically pay people 5 cents per message posted and still be happy with the net result.

Depressing? You bet.

Maybe I shouldn't be joking about that dentist's chair ...

That being said, I think that this forum's moderators -- sorry, "super administrators"  -- do an excellent job in removing such spam. I just hope there won't be too much of it to keep up the good work.