As many of you know I am a member of a cooking forum. We are now also going through a period of spammers, plus advertising in sig lines and suspected sock-pocket discussions of new products. One was a 'coupon club.'

As you can guess, they also have a very good moderator who is trying to be vigilant. And like most organizations the suggestions are either "more vigilance" or "more mods." Yikes, most bikers want less rules and more workable real-world answers.

I informed their moderator that we have a time-zone problem here. RK is in a more western zone allowing our home-grown idiot to smear our forum in every section knowing that such litter will remain for several hours. I began a thread there on possible suggestions.

I assume that you guys are also members on other boards. Has anyone ever found a workable procedure to blunt blatant spamming on their favorite forum?

Since this is an open forum for all we can only rely on our members and mods to inform us of what is going on here. We do investigate the source and ban them. It will eventually stop. In the mean time we will continue to be on top of this problem and any help that you can give will be welcome.

Hope that everyone is having a wonderful summer!

Ride Safe!

Art
HRF

HM, your comment seems to be the one I hear the most. That is, it's us the members who have to be vigilant and keep this stuff to a minimum. But yikes, there for a while I was finding ten new threads in the AM, all from the same spammer.

Why his mom tolerated him doing this to her computer baffled me.

Cross you fingers, it's been good here for a few days...

People join the forum it is very difficult to determined who is a spammer or not we can't check each individual. Rest assured that we have it under control and you will see less and less of it as time goes on. We monitor the site regularly. While most people do not spam, the majority of it is coming from China and we have almost banned the entire country. Let us know if we missed anything.

Headmaster, I am speaking to the global idea of spam. As you know, RK is driving himself batty doing the day-to-day grunt work on this topic. And frankly, it's good to see you getting actively involved in this. (Hey, you should post more, let us get to know you. I know more about my Aunt Clara's third husband, and that's not bragging, just a sad fact.)

To most of us older guys with lots of forum experience, HRF is an oasis. We didn't 'register,' we cling to it. No posers (that I'm aware of) and plenty of guys writing about tours, daily driving and modifications for continued use. My bike shop is like that--get a cuppa there and you see guys grabbing spark plugs, oil filters and gaskets, not chrome polish and crappy magazines.

Have you missed anything? I am now a member of three forums. I consider HRF my "home forum." An attack here--even over spam--is like an attack on my character or my intelligence. When I have a story, an opinion or a gripe I come here, usually as my first and only outlet. I want to talk to bikers. If I want smoke blown up my skirts I'll go buy a used car.

If.. who am I kidding... When they spam the forum it is only for a couple hours in the mornings. And getting rid of them is much easier than all the time it takes them to do the spamming. Just look at the time stamps, some of the times are five minutes apart, thats not because of the program its because they have to enter the info by hand. Deleting takes about 10 seconds and as hard as they hit as long as no one answers the thread it all goes away.
I don't think we will ever have a day without the spamming threat but in the end we all know we're not buyin what they're sellin so other than a "bump" that we temporarily drive around the spammers are losers all the way around.

RK, I understand your position. To one of these clowns that scant few hours is a "win." We have lurkers, and we have members who read posts and do not reply. Spamming is a game of numbers and percentages. Ten messages left on HRF for two hours could have the potential of several hundred hits.

However, I've been watching the "replies" tally here. Happily, most times it's still "0" by the time you get out of your jammies and back into harness.

It still doesn't make it right.

(Ya' know, I still have that scarlet red robe I had made for myself when I ran for pope a few years back--I doubt that power can corrupt a pure and merciful spirit such as myself. Give me the power of 'veto' and spam will be gone instantly and his IP address will be given to my 'cousins.')

No it's never going to be right. BUT, the crap is so off the wall and since it's not left up for any real length of time the damage is minimized.

On the cooking forum we are now getting hit with spammers who appear innocent but are using links on their sig-line. While it appears that the mod/administrative staff is getting lax on social issues, at least they are trying to hit spammers.

Well, of course. If they have to take a stand it follows that they will protect banner advertisers and not people. The problem I'm having with this is we just blame "the economy." However, setting up some form of computer advertising macro, buying enough cache' to handle the large influx of traffic, sending out bots of posts in the tens of thousands (and knowing the majority will go nowhere and do nothing) must have some major costs.

More to the point, it ticks off anyone with a brain who might be a future customer. For example, I'm turning my wife loose on every Ethiopian prince who is having trouble getting his inheritance into the USA...

Last Sunday Dateline had a special about that scam. Took out someone right on tv but before they got him they took hundreds of thousands of $$$$ from a lady. They are making big money. They pray on peoples greed. Anything that comes out of London, England you need to be leery of. The Nigerians can get a phone number that forwards to them from England. Any angle that they can get they use. They do this on dating sites too. Get some pic of this drop dead girl and say that she wants to come to USA but has no money to get here. You can fill in the rest. Put a lock on your wallets and oh ya purses too!