Kitchen spam!

[KateGladTidings]

[Laura Tyewa]

Yay a real person! Welcome to the board, Mrs Dale.

In honesty, I think 30 threads of kitchen spam would put me off more than not being able to post links.

[TravellingMum]

[MamaKh]

[KateGladTidings]

[Rosie_t_Riveter]

I wonder if the fact that the links are still there in the user profile, even if their posts are deleted, is an incentive for the k17ch£n spammers to keep coming back here? Can the mods delete the link at the same time as deleting/banning? Maybe if we did that the spammers would choose a different forum to hit all the time.

[Allium]

In my current state of sleep deprivation I'm not sure I have a field of expertise! Anyway, until recently DH was the techy one (& still does all the SEO related tech while I'm learning all about ecommerce). I'm not sure if making links nofollow would be enough...I'll ask him once 'she who does not sleep' has stopped dribbling on me and...you know...GTFTS!

(Kate, it sounds like what you're doing now is what I used to spend my days on...lots of blogs & articles)

[Allium]

Sorry if I'm misquoting him, but DH says that ideally you'd want to set links as nofollow AND make people post x times before they can add links in to posts or profiles. Nofollow links still have a small amount of value. There are probably some other backend tweaks that could also be done to help. No idea how much work any of them would be I'm guessing this has been thought of already, but if there are a lot of them coming from the same IP address you can block that. Doesn't help if our 50 k---n spammers are using 50 IP addresses!

[ToothFairy]

They all use different IP addresses Allie.

[Allium]

Sneaky.

[TravellingMum]

Ok sorry to bring this up again....is there a way for me, somehow , to filter out all the kitchen threads? Like in the morning, I wake up, click on 'new posts' and none of them are things you lot have written! I tried just clicking on active threads - but same thing. I guess I have to go through each section (ok not such a hard ship) and sift through them. Have to admit though, increasingly can't be bothered even looking through. Silly kitchen spam grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

[meerkatsmum]

I've been tempted to say the same thing as TrM but haven't wanted to insult the mods. I really appreciate the work you guys do to zap the kitchen spam posts. I use the active topics function and most mornings (Australian time) there are 3-4 forum posts and the rest are kitchen. I must admit, it is getting increasingly frustrating to use the forum.

As discussed up thread, it's seems to be our non-uk members that find this because of time differences.

[DandelionFrosting]

Is there some way to permanently spam-proof, so that the poor mods don't have to spend all their time just deleting post after post? I even wouldn't mind if all links were disabled -- occasionally having to copy and paste would be less trouble than wading through kitchens. I don't know if disabling links would stop them, but it might be worth trying for a bit? How do other forums keep them away, I wonder? What is it that's so special about us and melanoma sufferers that lets them get in so easily?

I also wouldn't mind helping with spam-blasting if it's all we can do, but I don't think I've been here long enough or am nearly reliable enough to be worthy of the sexy spring green name that comes with it. (Plus, I'm about to go off to the U.S. for a month and will lose the whole time zone advantage.)

Hmmm . . . I don't know anything about HTML, so it might be impossible, but is there any way we could pinpoint them? Are they all posting links to the same site? Could we somehow make it so that if you post a link to just that site your account gets instantly deleted? Is that dumb and impossible?

[Laura Tyewa]

The links change, and I've also seen them present them in a non-link form, so they'd get around it. The problem is that they are humans, so as we invent some rule to stop them doing it, they'll find a work around.

Hiding a post when reported might save some headache for readers, but will still require people to report and mods to delete.

[shye]

Hi guys,
it is a complete and utter nightmare, eh? I've not been around as much lately, but still often delete 5-10 everytime I open the forum. I think one of the issues is that Jem, our techno-genius is overworked (and underpaid ) but we'll keep trying to sort it.