Tim & the crew,

Am I the only one getting fed up with the spurious posters in every section who have advertising signatures.

Would it be possible to prevent any posts which have this sort of link in them?

Example in the "Charts" section "Possible issue with Italy chart". Spoils what is otherwise an intelligent forum?

Regards,

Max

If there were an automated way of doing it, we would have done it. I'm fed up too because I keep having to delete them. At some point we may be able to upgrade the forum software and that might help.

Have a look at Stopforumspam and similar services.

It collates a database of known usernames, IP addresses, etc of spammers and link-farmers, from the community of participants, and you can configure logic to block attempts to post or register by anyone with a risk score. If any get through, when you ban them they are appended to the database..... helps everyone fight back! We have used it and found it very effective, reducing volume of spam by perhaps 90%- Some still get through, but it significantly reduces the moderation overhead.

We now use and cross reference three different services, and register offenders with all three. Very few get through!

We also use a series of "honeypot" sites on the same framework to identify them (they often target a particular technology as they have worked out ways to do it with Bots)- if the same username / IP address shows up in multiple sites in coordinated way that would tend to attract a very high risk score, and can be presumed to be an offender, or at least alerted for close moderation.



I'll try to find out the names of the various others we use, and post them back here.