Topic: Spammers

[karx-elf-erx]

When I noticed that this user had registered here yesterday, I immediately wondered whether that might be a spammer. Looking at the account's e-mail address, the suspicion thickened. After a while of running your own forum, you get a feeling for that.

As it has turned out, I was right.

What I usually do when seeing newly registered uncommon usernames on my forum (need not be as artificial as that one, they can even look quite "normal"), the first thing I do is to examine that account's e-mail address and signature. Very often spammers enter links to some commercial websites they are advertising for in their signature. Such accounts get deleted right away. If the signature is empty but the account seems suspicious, I have an eye on it for a few days. Some spammers add their sig later and even go through the trouble of posting something seemingly Descent related - you need to take a closer look at it to detect that while sounding reasonably, it doesn't really have to do with the thread they post in - and hope the ad link they have placed in their sig stays unnoticed. Such posts disappear in an instant together with their entire account (fortunately, phpBB3 allows to delete all posts made using a certain account together with that account).

So taking a closer look at newly registered accounts may save work and trouble later on.

[Kaiaatzl]

Yep, and could someone delete the spam posts please?

Did you know that the computer usage of the word spam comes from Monty Python?