my introduction

[DizzyIzzy]

Lol. It's the same approach some of the spambots who overrun one of the other forums I go on use. That or the blatant drug advertising and/or porn thread titles. It's strange, but it's at a point now that whenever I see an advertisement for a disgusting pornographic act, I feel strangely at home.

Let's not let it get like that here.

[Islander]

Originally Posted by DizzyIzzy

Let's not let it get like that here.

It's never going to get like that here.

When I look at a list of 20-odd applicants each morning, all I have to go on is the user name, the e-mail address and the IP number. Most are obvious meat bots: the name is a giveaway and/or the e-mail address is suspicious. (A couple of times I've refused someone, only to get an indignant query from a certified, genuine applicant). But sometimes the name and address match and are both reasonable, and the IP # is not on the list I keep of prior offenders, and so I approve. Usually you never see them because they rarely post.

But once in a while, someone who looked genuine turns out to have an agenda, and I click back to find 20 spams...or one of you shoots me an alert. They are always gone before they can do much damage.

Sometimes it is a tough call, however. Salamande left a one-word sig that led to a product ad site. May I remind you that three regular members here also link their sig to a sales site....

[DizzyIzzy]

Hehe, this is true. Though, they're not for "<insert celeb name here> <insert Russian alphabet here> <insert dodgy verb here> <insert drug name here>".

I doubt many forums get like that, and there's no way this one ever could. The only reason the one I'm thinking of does is because it's run by Sony, who don't give the admins power to vet new members because they don't particularly care (and it's a reasonably popular band with people joining daily from around the world, so vetting would be impractical anyway). Which means the mods have to delete around 200 new spam threads daily, unless a particularly nasty breed of spambot takes over and posts over 5,000 threads in a single day until a mod logs in and sees what's happening, in which case it's about 5,000 threads in a day... not generally an issue, except for the occasional real thread being deleted in the process. The things we put up with eh.