A Message about Spammers

[peter365]

HI there folks and in particular my fellow moderators.

This morning the forum was blitzed by a Spammer called Kamorkasel . I can live with someone trying to sell me Raybans, Nike or dammit even Viagra and treat these as a mild irritation . However Kamorkasel's post were of an extremely (and I mean extremely) pornographic and distasteful nature.

I'm sure we all want this forum to a be a safe place for people to go without seeing that sort of content so I'd just ask my fellow mods to be extremely careful when approving new members.

The spambots user names seem to fall into two groups :

One is the nonsensical names like Kamorkasel, Japedhow and others that don't scan like a name a genuine puzzler would use.

The others seem to be a man's name followed by a 3 letter word e.g. Danielimp , Richardbib etc.

I'd just ask that we exercise caution when approving new members and work by the rule that if the name doesn't look like a genuine user then it probably isn't one. Obviously viewing the new users pending posts is the sure way of deciding but failing that I'd rather keep a genuine user waiting than have our forum overrun with horrific stuff like it was this morning.

I just wanted to let members know that this mornings situation was very regrettable and reassure them that we're trying to combat it.

[Balin]

I saw some of that spammer's posts. I deleted 15-20 of them (in the early morning my time) but I don't have the authority to ban users. Next time I'll send a PM to the more powerful mods.

The other thing I've seemed to notice about spammers is that their usernames are often 10 letters long. I don't know why.

[peter365]

I have banning privileges and make sure that when deleting spam I also ban the user.

[GalFisk]

The board has thousands upon thousands of members registered inside of half an hour on jun 26. 2014, with 0 posts. Can a mod just delete all of those?