Well done moderators!

<p>It would seem that (at least for now) the moderators have won their battle against the spammers - well done, it must have taken a lot of effort. I would be interested in reading any explanation which people may have as to what this spamming is all about - is it just stupid mischief-making or is there some deeper (crazy) rationale behind it?</p>

<p>I should have kept quiet - I see a new wave of spam has started!</p>

<p>I've just flagged dozens more as spam. Most, it appears from two new users.<br /><br />PN admins/devs: THIS IS SUCH A SIMPLE PROBLEM TO SOLVE. Limit brand new accounts to a low number of posts for the first 24 hours. And when users who have spam-flagging rights mark as spam a post made by an account that is less than 24 hours old, mark ALL of that day's posts from that same new user as spam, so that your unpaid volunteer users who clean up this stuff can get back those 15 minutes of their lives.</p>

<p>Looks like a lull in the storm for a bit...</p>

<p>@Matt. That is a great suggestion, and it works just fine with many fora platforms that natively support this function, or have third party developer apps installed to provide it. It's called 'flood control' and can limit anyone to specific numbers of posts in any time frame or or until a threshold of legitimate posting has occurred. Some can hold posts in moderation status for a period of time to see what happens. This PN platform is a custom built old school CMS so that might not be an option unless someone codes in the function. Seeing as the forum gods are concentrating on rolling out the new CMS for us--one that reminds me an awful lot like everything that has gone wrong in conventional usability with vBulletin and their Connect platform--I don't expect that to happen.</p>

<p>This sort of spam is a PITA for a worldwide venue like PN. I have developed and owned a number of fora in the past, been general manager of a HUMONGOUS site with 450K+ members (QRZ.COM), and currently develop and publish mypipeclub.com with 300 members and around 500 unique visitors and lurkers a day. It is an uphill battle to keep the crap out, and keep the server side of things secure against things like this and various mail function systems out of the hands of nuisance spammers. I spend at least 4 hours a week making sure that the rubbish is carried out to the digital dustbin and the server and applications are fully up to date. The easy way if you are not international in your interest base like PN is to simply blacklist the entire scopes of IP ranges that these spammers come out of. Very few are either clever enough, or interested enough to Tor around this.</p>

<p>Remember that these clowns are only interested in their nonsense remaining on a site long enough for the search engines to pick it up. For a high traffic site like this, all they might need is an hour or so. The industriousness of this effort is hard to control for. I am not sure of the going rates now, but a couple years ago an internet marketer could hire a room full of people in the Philippines or Malaysia to blast guaranteed spam placement in multiple forums for several days--in the tens of thousands of postings--for the meager sum of $50-100 bucks</p>

<p>My hat is off and sincerest appreciation goes to the admins and moderators who keep this place as orderly as it is. Running a forum and CMS enterprise is not as easy as it looks. Lots of folks think differently. Sort of like those who believe that they could run a successful restaurant but have never done so. Most could not, and the majority who try find themselves in bankruptcy court in no time... :-)</p>

<p>Now that there are fewer active members to the site compared to how it used to be the largest site when I first joined, I guess the spam is an inevitability.</p>