Hi everyone,
Good News & Bad News . . .
First the bad:
Just visited the Squeakland web forums for the first time in a while. There were several real messages from people that don't have mailing list subscriptions, some asking for help. Since most of use read the mailing lists and not the forums, these have gone unnoticed.
Now the good:
Also since I detached them (almost a month ago), there's only been one bogus account created and two spam messages, which is quite good.
The result:
I've resync'ed the forums and mailing lists again, at least until the spammers rediscover us.
For some history, here's part of the email from October 19th:
--- I've disconnected the automatic forwarding of forum posts to the the mailing lists, which will solve the problem for the current majority of our community that uses mailing lists (at least until the human spammers discover them as well.) This doesn't solve the other problem though, which is spam on the forums, which is unfortunately because most new users and children are likely to read the forums first, not the mailing lists.
This means I need your help. Please volunteer to become a moderator on the forums, so you can help me weed out the spam there.
Yes, we'll be attempting new technical solutions, such as blocking the most troublesome human spammer websites. But as with all spam, this is a game of tug-a-war between the spammers and the rest of us. There will always be spam we do not catch automatically, which means we will always need help deleting it before someone gets the wrong idea about Squeakland.
For a history of this issue, search for "forum spam" in forum search. It had gotten better for a while, now it's worse again. --
-- Timothy Falconer Squeakland Foundation http://squeakland.org 610-797-3100 -- "Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do." ... piaget