Spammers ...

[Dolphyn]

Wow, it looks like the forum has about 60 new members today. Many of the profiles have links to spammy websites, and some of the new users have posted rather weird comments.

I'd suggest making it a little more challenging to join the website. :)

[jdbgn]

Spammers or lurkers?
Perhaps potential Aptera buyers.
It is the internet after all.

[evmavin]

It's the Alaskan oil companies..

[c0mp13x]

Wow, it looks like the forum has about 60 new members today. Many of the profiles have links to spammy websites, and some of the new users have posted rather weird comments.

I'd suggest making it a little more challenging to join the website. :)
The Mods appreciate your concerns, but it is a constant battle to fight the spam bots on a popular forum these days. There are literally thousands of spam bot computers worldwide that automatically create accounts and attempt to post advertisements 24/7.

As a few volunteer mods here on a forum we are interested in, it is a mountain of work to fight the bots. As fast as software is written to ban bots, the spammers break through with countermeasures. In the early days of this forum (beginning of '08), we had daily posts of explicit porn and pictures. It was horrible and we scrambled to find software and anti-spam measures that we could put in place.

Part of what makes this board easy to use and successful is it uses the most popular forum software, vBulletin. At the same time, the popularity of vBulletin has encouraged spammers to write tons of software to automatically create accounts and post on forums like ours.

After months of fighting, frustration and trying multiple software fixes, we found methods to (help) prevent bots from posting. Whew!

Unfortunately, the creation of new memberships by bots, and even email verification and captchas to fight that, have not been as successful in preventing the deluge of new accounts. After banning hundreds (thousands?) of bad accounts, IPs and email domains, we've reached the point of... well, if it ain't porn pics and viagra ads, who cares about a bunch of benign, phony accounts? We've got our own jobs and families to attend to.

So... enough of the mod rant, we're doing most of this in the background so the discussion of our beloved Aptera can continue... and we can finally figure out how wide the front wheels are and what we're gonna do when somebody rips-off our extension cord! Ha! :D

:happy0025:

[Dolphyn]

Yup, I've moderated some forums, and spammers are a huge pain. Thanks for all of your efforts.

I do think a new avalanche of spam has just started in the last day or two, and those dozens of new spammers are bound to start posting soon if they're not deleted or banned.

Lookie here: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=286535

[c0mp13x]

Thanks Dolphyn, banned a few accounts and deleted some threads this morning. If you see posts that look suspicious, please point them out or let us know.

Thanks :happy0025: