Ok, over the past many years it seemed we'd get a canoe salesman once every few months, at best. Now, it seems it's every day. Why? What has changed? Is it that there are that much more spam artists out there? I kinda doubt that. Has something changed that mas made GRM more attractive to these low-lifes?
I'm just wondering why the change.
I'd like to end this little post with a hearty Thank You to the mods and other staffers that are able to shut these freaks down very quickly.
Sounds like the security needs to be beefed up for registration.
I think the spammers are attracted to the hotlinks.
We see spikes in canoe traffic on a board I moderate at the same time we see the spikes here. This weekend has been quiet, but for the past 2 weeks, 2 or 3 spammers a day has been the norm. I'm one of 2 over-active moderators over there, so we clean things up as soon as it's spotted. Over the past couple of months, it seems to be getting progressively worse. Heck, for a time period, we moderated new membership approvals and they STILL got through. We decided that the best course of action was to wait until they hit and then kill them off. We don't see things taken off of here in mere minutes because the guys running this board have real jobs making some sort of paper things.
Yep, they seem to come in waves. There's clearly a weekend push, because I'm sure they know that a lot of boards aren't as thoroughly moderated then.
Speaking of that, you know what else isn't thoroughly moderated on weekends? Sirius radio. A couple of the stations had error messages all day Sat. and Sun., and that's not the first time I've noticed this.
Margie
Marjorie Suddard wrote:
Yep, they seem to come in waves. There's clearly a weekend push, because I'm sure they know that a lot of boards aren't as thoroughly moderated then.
Speaking of that, you know what else isn't thoroughly moderated on weekends? Sirius radio. A couple of the stations had error messages all day Sat. and Sun., and that's not the first time I've noticed this.
Margie
Which channels did you have trouble with? I had the tunes going all weekend no problem with any of the stations I picked. They shuffled their channels last Wednesday. Might be the ones you were looking for are a different number now.
Naw, tunes were ok, but I think they don't have all the channel-shuffling complete, b/c instead of song title it was displaying "Message63". Which may not be a problem, but only if all the songs they played on the alternative stations this weekend were actually titled "Message63".
Margie
Mental
SuperDork
5/9/11 10:12 a.m.
Ditch sat radio. Pandora on your smartphone is the way to go.

For all those canoes we've been gettin.
nice work duke!
whats your 4chan screen name? 
I shot this years ago at a car show and have been meaning to post it for a while.

It's also a byproduct of popularity. Their whole purpose for their posts (many of them, anyway) is to boost their rankings for search engines. As our site grows (we're trending about 30% higher traffic than a year ago.) we become a more attractive target for the spambots.
Making registration more difficult is my #1 strategy. Forcing new users to execute a bit of human logic will help. Captchas are effective, but a pain for users. We're going to have new users answer a GRM-specific question before their account is activated. Stuff like "Who is the publisher of Grassroots Motorsports" or "What color is the LeGrand project car" will separate some of the wheat from the chaff. Most of the spam identities create their profile, drop their spam, and are gone within an hour; asking them for specific answers will make us a harder target.
This will be part of our (OMG it's taking FOREVER) highly anticipated site redesign, so it's still a little ways away. In the meantime, we deeply appreciate your patience.
Making registration harder? That's been done.
