Hi Forum Member!
If you came here from one of my online forums then thank you for taking the time to read this post, and also thank you for being part of my online community network.
We’ve had an increase in spam posts lately, especially from the porn and pharmaceutical industries. Spam is when they drop a link to their website on a post; they do this to increase their rankings in the search engines. 99.99% of the time it is a new member and it is done on their first post. It’s very easy to spot. Some that are very clever will disguise it as an actual post, with an unrelated link.
ON MY FORUMS I DO NOT ALLOW LINKS FROM NEW MEMBERS – so if you see a member with one or two posts that has dropped a link in any forum besides the “Website Links” forum – PLEASE REPORT IT. I have a lot of anti-spam features installed on our boards, but it’s not catching all of them. It is a major problem lately for anyone who runs a forum, and not something focused specifically to my network.
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HOW TO REPORT A POST
This little exclamation point graphic appears on the top right of every single post on my forums. If you click it, you will be “reporting a post” – it will ask you to briefly describe why it is being reported. I am immediately sent an email with this information and will take care of it ASAP.
MODERATORS – Mods, please don’t just move the spam post, please report it to me – then I can additionally ban the hosting email company and IP of the poster.
THE REVENGE
Many porn companies use automated robots to create member accounts at forums – I have features in place so they have to do it by hand. It takes them much more time to create an account, than it takes for me to remove the post and boot them. So at least there’s a little revenge built into the process.
Let’s keep the forums clean. Thank you for your help!