Spammers... what to do

[gretsch-talk]

Hey folks,

The Mods and I are on call to get rid of spammers when they show up. But you need to do two things to help us out:

1. DON'T post a response!!!! That makes our job harder.

2. Click the REPORT post icon. You'll find this at the bottom of every post on the site. See below.

We'll take care of the rest. When you click the report post icon you'll be instantly sending the Mods an email with a link directly to the problem post. One of us will most likely be able to respond pretty quickly to take care of the problem.

Please don't create a post about the spammer, respond to the spammer, send a PM to the Mods or Admin or send an email to the Mods or Admin. Just click report and we'll take care of it.

Thanks!
PS. Keep in mind that the Mods are not available 24/7/365 to deal with each reported spammer in seconds. We will get them, ban them, report them to a spammer database and remove their spam. Just give us to time to get to it.

Here is the REPORT button and what it looks like:

 

[gretsch-talk]

People Seem to need a refresher on this.

 

[Synchro]

I want to thank everyone for their reports. When I woke up, at 5:30 local time, there were 49 emails in my inbox, almost all were spam reports. Within a minute or two I had banned the user, flagged their address and removed most of the posts. I still had to work through the reports and make certain that there wasn't some straggler spam post out there, but after the first four reports I didn't find anything. Nonetheless, I still had to mark each report as resolved before I moved on to the next.

Most spam hits overnight, so waking up to spam reports is not particularly unusual (when we have spam). Please understand, we can't monitor the forum all night. I go to a job every day, just like everyone else.

BTW, my day job involves managing a network with about 80 users. We are beset by spam, just like everyone else on earth, although the two spam filters though which all of our mail passes make a big difference. When we have all-staff meetings I always say the same thing, don't click on any links found in spam (or within any email from unknown sources) and don't allow spam to make you angry. I hate it as much as anyone, but railing against it only raises your blood pressure. The spammer doesn't care in the slightest.

There is one upside to today's spam attack, I now have doctorates from seven different universities in a variety of subjects.