IKs' has notified me about a new

[winoweenie]

ruling to keep the spammers off'n the wines lovers forum and it sounds as solid as the first BM after a weeks constipation. Jackie I heartily reccommend adopting the exact same policy as it seems the spammers have been outnumbering posters here for the last month or so. WW :!: :!:

[Drew]

Here's a link to the new policy at WineLoversPage.

"link":http://www.wineloverspage.com/forum/village/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=43459

[Kcwhippet]

What surprises me is that these spammers can attack the WineBoard and it appears to go unnoticed by whoever the SysAdmin is here - sometimes for a full day. When I see the spams, I delete them. Anyway, congrats to Robin for being proactive.

[Thomas]

Such a system requires that someone field emails on a regular basis, which, depending on volume, can be an overload in itself. Still, it's a better way to catch the nutballs.

[winoweenie]

I don't think a post every 5 hours and 16 minutes will overload enny thin' I can envision. WW

[andrawes76]

I think a new user should have their post authorized before accepting them to the Forum. Kind of like blogger.com does it. Otherwise we get into a membership queue issue. Having new users have their posts monitored seems to be a better thing to do. I have to check to see if its something we can do with software before we can promise that...

[Kcwhippet]

Well, Alex if every other Wine Forum/Board on the net has figured out how to keep spammers out, I don't understand why it should be such a gut wrencher to do it here.

[winoweenie]

For heavens-to-betsy Alex this is so derned simple even I understand it. What the devils' your problem?????? WW

[Jackie]

I have to add my two cents here, for what it's worth. The policy that the Wine Lover's Page is implementing requires every new person to basically wait for approval before they can post. The approval is a manual process. Someone (like me) would be responsible for monitoring emails from those who want to join the board, then manually registering them, etc. before they could do anything on the board.

To me, this is really discouraging to the newcomers who are legitimately wanting to join us. It makes everyone wait to be manually approved, just because some spammers are annoying us. I'm really not sure that the trade-off is worth it.

There are forums that are monitored only by TEAM. I'm trying to figure out what the password is for TEAM, so I can get into these forums and delete spammers. Any of our admins who know this, please email me at jackie@wines.com.

Our old bulletin board system was able to block spammers by IP address. Also, we could easily ban/delete a username, if that user was abusing the board. I don't know the new system because it was developed specifically for this forum (not a commercial software package)... and the code was written just for Wines.com. I will try to figure this out for us here... and see if we can't fix things that way.

Having everyone manually approved is a last resort, in my opinion, because it penalizes everyone who wants to join us... and you know that people don't like to wait for anything.... They will likely just stay away from the board. What if it takes me a day or more to get back to them? They'll just lose interest... I don't know how many will bother to come back and post after waiting. Or how many newcomers we will just lose.

That's my concern. I would like this place to be as accommodating and easy-to-join as possible.

It's a huge trade-off... we really need to consider this carefully. If there's ANY other way, I'd suggest trying that first.

Jackie