spam question for admin

[Mitts]

All this spam is a real pain. Is there any way things could be organized so that if, say, five people report a post as spam it's then automatically removed??? One of the dictionaries I use has a system like that but I'm not sure exactly how it works. Yesterday was crass

[rfawag]

I agree, I reported several posts as spam yesterday. Very annoying.

[psarapsych Graduate]

Hi Mitts, I've reported a few of them and asked admin about it on the feedback form and Lora responded saying that if it were easy to remove them they would have done by now. The only thing I would say is that most of the time their forum names are just a jumble of odd letters so that would be a way of vetting them.

It really is annoying. Let's hope they do find a way of dealing with it.

Cheers

Sara x

p.s. I've got my running music sorted - yaaaay. Mostly golden oldies BUT brilliant to run along to and feel happy

[Mitts Graduate in reply to psarapsych]

I run to golden oldies and a few golden newies too - it's the feeling happy that gets us through, I guess!

[psarapsych Graduate]

Too right!

[Hidden]

Yes, we are definitely looking in to ways to fix this problem, so don't think it's going unnoticed! What you suggested is likely what we will implement, however at the moment we are working on a whole list of ways to improve HealthUnlocked (did you know we have more communities than just C25K?). Thanks for bearing with us for now!!

If you're interested take a look at our directory: healthunlocked.com/directory

Best,

Lora

HU Community Manager

[Mitts Graduate in reply to Hidden]

Thanks Lora. From what I can remember you had to register and login to the dict and then you could zap spam, and when I think it was actually only 3 people had zapped it the offending post was automatically removed. Would be good here as well!

Thanks for the link too

[Lainybops Graduate]

THE CHEEK!!!(see above!!!) noone on here is going to buy anything from you!!!!

[Pearsey]

Had a whole spate of them yet again yesterday. I did report, but does everyone I wonder?

Would really like to have seen anons comment-is it from the spammer?? Was it yet another ad I wonder?

Good you have your music sorted at last psarapsych

Colette

[Mitts Graduate in reply to Pearsey]

It was just another of the same old same old...

But never mind... they're the only bad thing here and they're quickly enough scrolled over...

[psarapsych Graduate in reply to Pearsey]

Hi Colette - hey thanks... weird, I only just saw this so sorry for not replying sooner. Have just put up a long spiel which included me running to my own music for the first time - an odd experience for various reasons. But hey... I got to jig along to some wonderful old songs I've not heard for ages (my hubby is 8 years younger - a real generation gap as far as music's concerned :-)!!! ) so a wonderful excuse to get out and scream along to the lyrics - heee heee :-)!!!!!! Cheers Colette, Sara xox

[Pearsey in reply to psarapsych]

No worries Sara-I had forgotten about it anyway

Colette xx

[Pearsey]

Too true! But not nice, just not nice! I think the admin should moderate the mailings. Yeah, I know we wouldn't get them immediately-and that would be a pain, but you just gotta be nice on here

[Hidden]

Hi guys,

Like I said, we are figuring out ways to get rid of the spammers but it's not a simple fix.

Just so you know, I receive the report of abuse notification email based on the user who is posting the spam, so you only need to report it once if it's the same username. When I ban the user, all their posts automatically go away.

Hope this makes sense.

Lora

[psarapsych Graduate in reply to Hidden]

Lora, just a thought..... most of these spammers create 'names' made up of just random letters - every time I see a post I absolutely know beforehand that it will be a spammer - can't you just refuse their membership if they can't provide and identifiable name??? I'm sure you've thought about it - I just thought "ooh that's an obvious spammer" so thought you might be able to as well - maybe not as easy as that huh?? Cheers and thanks for all the hard work :-), Sarax

[Hidden in reply to psarapsych]

Thanks for the suggestion... we'd have to make that identifiable by the computer though since we don't manually verify every new user otherwise we'd need to have a full time person dedicated to that task! It's very challenging to create a code for the computer to recognise a jumble of letters over someone's real username. Hope that makes sense. Will keep you all updated on our progress with this issue!

[angelinably Graduate]

What if you implemented one of those "Please type the word in the space provided" things like most other forums. Think that might stop them.

[completerunner in reply to angelinably]

A "captcha"

These only work when the creator of the new username or poster is a computer. There is that much money to be made from spam/phishing now that they actually employ humans to just manually type it to bypass the captcha. The negative of the captcha on every post is that your genuine user then gets fed up and you end up with far fewer posts..

[swanscot Graduate in reply to completerunner]

Yes, I have actually given up on trying to post replies on some blogs, etc, when I couldn't correctly decipher the CAPTCHA first time. If I feel what I really want is say is important, I may try twice, but only occasionally.