Somebody get rid of nsk

[TraceyHand]

I believe there is at least one person who normally checks over the weekends - but obviously you can't expect anyone to monitor the forum every few hours. (Except us perhaps )

Sad but true, eh?

Maybe it's possible to have a capcha that is required per posting; one that changes randomly or from a list.

That's the best idea I've heard/read all day, tbh
It doesn't penalise geniune posters who want to post 'urgently' (whether it gets a response or not) and don't want to be caught up in a screening process...yet makes it a whole lot more difficult for the 'bots to post spam, I would imagine.

Still doesn't stop Joe Bloggs, if theyre determined enough though.
I wonder if there should perhaps be a 'one thread per 24 hours' limit for new posters?
I initially thought 'one post' but that means they couldn't reply to any questions about their initial post, if needed...

I'm not sure there IS an ideal solution

[Duncan Rounding]

I believe there is at least one person who normally checks over the weekends - but obviously you can't expect anyone to monitor the forum every few hours. (Except us perhaps )

Maybe it's possible to have a capcha that is required per posting; one that changes randomly or from a list.

[Mark H]

Forgive me if this has been covered elswhere, but would it be possible to give two or three trusted forum members the ability to remove blatant spam (and even remove the account), particularly to cover weekends?

[cdicken]

Currently it's about once a day - and they are by people who manually register and then sell the logon details to spammers. Nice. So hopefully an Actinic/Windows/goat related question will help filter out these people from genuine customers.

[Duncan Rounding]

I think the answer that CD was thinking of was just 'Actinic'.

I'm not so sure it would help though anyway are these (occasional) spam postings by robot or manually done? I've never bothered to look at the posting time differences.

It's only about once a week that it happens anyway isn't it?

[pinbrook]

the q needs a easy one word answer

i presumethe answer is the extension but how do you spell it

dw extension or other

anyway my reply has put paid to that Q

[Mark H]

"What's Actinic's Tool For Web Designers Called?"

Bit of a pain if that's what you came on the forum to find out.....

[cdicken]

I've been having a look at some alternative spam prevention, and I've just seen http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showt...highlight=spam which looks quite good. Instead of the captcha thing, you have to answer a question when you register such as 'What's Actinic's Tool For Web Designers Called?' or something which humans would know but bots and poor old sweatshop workers won't. I'll get our tecchie boys to check out the patch and try it out next week.

[jont]

Generally the forum is very well behaved. The amount of mods has dropped noticeably (especially since the defection of Bruce to the other side of the equation) over the past 12 months so are obviously not as quick to respond to spamming and inappropriate behaviour as quickly.

[pinbrook]

IMO even disabling hyperlinks won't stop spammers as they can still leave urls and rubbish posts - i'd prefer simply not to see these posts regardless of whether they have anything clickable

Having said that i tend to get more irritated by repeat questions were people have'nt bothered to search than i do by the odd chinese spammer

[guccij]

To my mind, while the spam merchants are a pain in the arse, they haven't spoilt my ability to search for posts which are relevant to any particular issue I might have.

With the red triangle now working again, and knowing that real Actinic people do actually read what goes on here, I can put up with a scattering of mad posts about Chinese dresses.

[Duncan Rounding]

The forum for the most part is a sales aid for Actinic - one of their biggest IMO and whether intended or not is often considered as 'product support'.

I have gained from ithe forum n two ways - by getting answers to questions as well as company business and whilst I agree that paying £10 is well worth the money, once you start charging for access you have expectations as to what you should receive and different people will have different expectations.

The simpest way to help with spam would be to just disable bb tags for 30 days so no hyperlinks could be posted - you can still cut and paste them manually in the interim - but this then might defeat the objective of the spammers.

[RuralWeb]

I’m sure others won't agree

Im certain there are as well but these are the people who extract the most from the forum IMO

[Fairyglass]

I recently paid a tenner to another forum I belong to for similar reasons- on that forum the technical articles alone were worth that, and this one's no different. There was a lot of argument before the fee was imposed, but pretty much all the regulars signed up eventually. The money went towards improving the forum structure, software and admin.

[Donna]

This forum is of great value to me and although I’m sure others won't agree I’m more than happy to pay for it.