Thanks everyone. I have some excellent leads to follow!

Cheapskate! Anyone else would have replaced the fan.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

Honestly I would not recommend free web hosting. By the time I set up my first website I have also chosen free web hosting and I was not satisfied. I had different ads on my website and the customer service was not satisfying. I then decided to choose a paid web host and with this company I am very satisfied.

My own fave for paid web hosting is Godaddy. Solid and the best customer service I ever had and fairly reasonable as well.

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

<Edited: web-hosting ad removed, and this is only being kept here temporarily as a temporary placeholder.>

I am leery of Shyam. For giggles, do a yahoo search.

All results are grey AND any other mention appears to be a spam.

Ok, simple test here. Shyam, what do you like best about the 65C02 series?


If no answer, then we can all draw our own conclusions...

[EDIT] am now 100% sure shyam is a spammer. Do a profile search. 2 posts, the first being the generic "I agree" or thanks for the info" kind of garbage.

And since the website shows up as a grey for safety with a yahoo search, am leery there as well...

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

That other post of his was a typical 'initial spam preparation' post (in that other thread. It's typically 'I agree with you' or some such.) So his post here is 101% certain to be astroturfing for that service he listed. Delete it all, I say.

-Tor

While it's possible, I'd rather leave that judgement to Garth - if Shyam is a genuine new poster this is quite a hostile reception. It looks to me likely that the suggested site is indeed a domain reseller.

Nightmaretony's quiz seems like an idea, but to add an inquisition to each new arrival would make this a strange place.

Garth will nuke an account (and posts) as soon as they promote an actual spam link, or post a nonsense comment. It's true that Shyam's first post is just a 'thanks', but that could be genuine.

Shyam: I hope you understand why this reaction has occurred. It's not personal, it's because forum spam is a big problem. The best thing to do, if you have a 6502 interest, is post something of your story in the Introduce Yourself thread.

(Maybe the best reaction in future is to PM Garth when any of us sees a suspicious first post? That avoids a confrontation, and thread pollution...)

Cheers
Ed

I did a web search on him, and he does seem to be in it only to promote his web-hosting service. He signed up on a whole lot of forums at once, and one of them already warned and then banned him for the same spam he posted above. He won't get a warning from us, just a boot and a ban. After everyone has had a chance to see this, I'll remove the last several posts to keep the forum more free of clutter.

Cool.. And for the inquisition question, would love to see it in the signup forum. Maybe a tiny essay question: "What is your favorite thing to do with the 6500 series?"

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

If the feature were available, I would prefer requiring the first post to be approved before it will show, maybe with the moderators' or administrator's option to require approval for the second one too, based on what they see in the first.

Here's partly what I'm thinking. Our soon-to-be daughter-in-law comes from an engineering family. She's a computer-science major, her sister just graduated from Cal Poly Pomona in mechanical engineering in the top 1% of her class, their dad was an environmental test engineer at Northrop, their cousin (another girl) just graduated from Cal Poly in math, and the brother who's a junior in high school is interested in robotics and has taken a couple of classes in it. At Christmas dinner I was suggesting he get into microcontrollers, and he was very interested. Someone like him might want to sign up on a forum like this to begin getting his feet wet, but he still doesn't know enough about the 6502 to answer the question above. The brains and the intentions are there but he's too green.

A first post can usually tell as the spammers have such a generic one. If a first post mentions wanting to play with or learn the 6500 series, then tis obviously not a spammer. The "I agree with whatever post" is a typical spammer one, though...

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

I agree with the last post

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Andrew Jacobs
6502 & PIC Stuff - http://www.obelisk.me.uk/
Cross-Platform 6502/65C02/65816 Macro Assembler - http://www.obelisk.me.uk/dev65/
Open Source Projects - https://github.com/andrew-jacobs

A feature like that would fix nearly all spam problems as far as I can see. I moderate another forum and I've many times been wondering why on earth there's no such feature in typical forum software? And for a couple of vintage computer wikis I frequent that feature would also solve their spam problems. From what I've seen from all these spammers there's no way they would be able to come up with a first post that wouldn't expose them for what they are. Maybe they would evolve some way to handle that at some point, but I think that won't be easy (for them).

On that forum I moderate there are as of now 497 'members'. The forum has only existed since August, and it's extremely low-profile. There are only 17 legit posts there, by some 4 or 5 legit posters. I have deleted some 1000 spam postings or more. Lots of IP ranges have been banned (including, in practice, everything coming from a certain European country). A this point I have scripts running to monitor new members and new posts, so that I can intervene quickly when necessary.

If simply the first post had to be approved the whole moderation job would be easy and lazy. I could handle that once a day, instead of all the time as of now. For a more busy forum a couple of moderators in two different time zones could easily handle the spammers.

There's one more feature that I would wish for: URLs in user info panels should be possible to disable. Some spammers only wish to show up as 'our newest member' on the front page, and that link goes to their user panel which contains just a bunch of spam links. Obviously member lists should not include banned members when non-moderators access those member lists.

-Tor

How 'bout this: I move these posts about spammers to a sticky, call it something like "What we do to spammers", and also publish the list of spammers we've kicked out, along with their email and IP addresses and what abuses they're guilty of! Actually the list would be far too long, but just showing the last moth's worth should be adequate to make them think twice before offending again. They'll find themselves banned here, but maybe other forums will pick up this tactic and make the price for spamming too high.