The discussion at hand begs the question; how do we manage to keep the spammers off this site so well?No answer necessary if it would compromise the same end. Does seem interesting though that CL has started to get some spammers, albeit dealt with fairly quickly, but present none-the-less. Whatever it is keep it up... no need for more ringtones or Chinese shoes here.Also I'm not shure what this spider thing is... someone (guest) that gets here via yahoo or whatever? Software can ID them?Yours in ignorance,Wally
Well, I had installed some features at one point which made it difficult for spammers to post with things they wanted to post. However, I don't think those features are working since I've upgraded the forum. I do allow guest posting in certain areas (if not all) but I'm not sure why spammers aren't trying to get in more.The spiders are basically programs that run by going around the internet visiting different sites. Some are good spiders, like search engines which just want to index your pages. Others are bad, like ones that scan for e-mail addresses to add to spam lists or even those that try to sign up on forums and post links to spammy web sites. They're automated programs so there are ways to ward them off. If you have ever run into a CAPTCHA feature (such as the squiggly word/number image that you have to type in when using certain forms on the web) then you can see how it's done. It's even better when there's a question you have to answer before being able to sign up....like "what's the opposite of black?" or some other simple question that robots may have a hard time defeating.It's actually an interesting subject and one that we'll all deal with more in the future...whether we want to or not. 😮
It amazes me how many people register and dont post....or never even come back. Why waste your time if your not really interested?
The problem may be that we're too civil here. I suspect many join discussion forums to argue or troll with people. Since we don't do much of that here, they get bored and leave. Which is a good thing mind you.