Polish spammers

Elizabeth, from one moderator to another.

You might want to ping the membership list to winnow it down. Though the high numbers might seem an asset they are now becoming a liability, a target for spammers. This is getting irritating. The spammers won’t be as interested if the numbers are reduced to reflect members with active email addresses.

Gerald

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because they are not that smart, obviously. They just do it by the numbers.

I agree that this is a bit annoying. This latest grouping does not appear to be a randon spam however. It looks like a targeted denial of service attack, designed to do just what it did: to harrass the users.

Looking at some of the postings, there are also a lot of random appearing letters that don’t translate into any language on Google Translator. I wonder if these are truly randon letters or some sort of code? ie- either computer code like a virus, or maybe an encrypted message. (I have no clue…. i’m just guessing here.)

Almost wonder if the whole thing is bot driven. However, cleaning out the list (inactive memberships over 18 month old?) might help.

Would hope it’s not a denial of service attack, can’t imagine a motive for that, save for some peeved off member.

(sigh)

I’ll repeat my usual suggestion, as another longtime list moderator. Do not allow unmoderated posts from new members. That’s all it takes! Somebody joins and posts, their comment does not show up until a moderator vets it. Once that happens and the moderator can see that the person is an actual person, they can allow the comment and switch the poster to unmoderated, never having to deal with that again. If it’s spam, their msg is blocked and their account deleted. When I ran my list, I had a trusted group of 10 other people with moderator privileges to check for such posts.

And/Or captcha application for membership in addition to the above.

Amen! to all the above.

Widmark

I’m guessing that was one of the old e-group services, like Yahoo? I have a couple of those. Fairly easily manageable if controlled as you suggest.

Note though that Briar is not at all the same set up. It does not send out postings via email. Therefore one does not have the same kind of control as moderator. And, as a member, you have to come here to be abused.

Gerald

That was a yahoogroup, but I’m familiar with more modern CMS type communities and groups as well. It shouldn’t be hard to arrange any number of methods to stop that from happening, and while I understand it can be a pain, I’d hate to see this site get to the point where there’s too much noise to sort through.

my oh my
we have been hit haven’t we