Just an observation before all the thought police get involved…( me included)
what is acceptable talk in this PUB…
i know when i go to a bar… i talk about everything from sailboats to women…
what is ok? i think the pub anything can be said…
sort of personal attacks… because like in a pub… a personal attack can lead to a fight outside… but why not talk about hotels. or your countries problems…
almost everywhere you look… you see posts being deleted. by us?
so i am going to lay it out… what can be talked about?
cheers… i need another beer… yo waitress… canadian hers:zbeer:
It’s not a question of what can be talked about IMHO, it’s a question of whether or not the posting is real or spam. Back when spammers sent bulk email from mail accounts, one of the ways my computer security company goaded hackers into attacking was to aggressively chase down the source of spams and get the spammers accounts cancelled. This caused a certain percentage of them to try and do nasty stuff to our sites, which we captured and analyzed. My personal trophy case is an email file with messages from admins acknowledging the cancellation of about 800 accounts
Now we have forum spam. The obvious ones are when some jerk signs on and posts an ad for hacked cellphones or bootleg software. The not so obvious ones are the “sock puppet” spam where the spammer comes in under one name asking a seemingly innocuous (but not r/c sailing related) question and then comes in later under a different name (the “sock puppet”) and answers it in a way that is actually a bogus endorsement for some product or service.
So, how do you detect these? First, you get the IP address and do a reverse DNS to see where the spam originates (if you’re lost here, google on these terms to learn how the Internet works). If the post says “I’m from Colorado” and the reverse DNS turns up India, well, ka-ching.
Second, you google on some distinctive phrase in the spam and see if this same question is spattered over the net. If it is, it’s time to lock and load
As cougar said, we’ve deleted a lot of these. Precisely zero of them have come back and complained about having their thread deleted. That’s all you need to know.
One minor addition to Earl’s post, is that as moderators we can kill and maim - we just can’t bury the dead.
What I am saying is that when a moderator (here) deletes a SPAM post, we can delete the message, and we can (usually) block the SPAM host ISP address, but unfortunately “our” deletion won;t remove (bury) the dead ones. So far only Chad as administrator can actually remove all traces.
I tried (unsuccessfully) to set up a thread and tried to “MOVE” the post to that location, but I didn’t have sufficient permissions to do that. Thus, some threads still have/contain the notice that Cougar, Earl or I killed one off - but our notice of it’s deletion remains.
I believe Chad reviews threads on occasion and physically removes the “traces” - but with as many posts that we have, it is time consuming. I do know Earl is pretty prompt in morning deletions - more so than I would have thought from someone out in New Mexico ! Would have thought I’d see it before him - but he must get up a lot earlier than I do.
One thing for sure - when you lodge a “complaint” or “report” a message, an automatic message is generated and comes to all of us (moderators) and we can quickly look and delete. My personal feeling is that with Earl so quick in the mornings, most SPAM efforts try only once. A few will try again, but we manage to get them in only a short period of time.
So to help out, all subscribers are encouraged to file a complaint about any posts and we will check them out as quickly as we can. Your help is important to keep the site clean too ! Sometimes we are able to catch them before they are reported.
