That's it. With live in-your-face no-click porn spam we have to do something with the board. Nobody wants to have post after post going live on the screen just by visiting the forum I'm sure.

Can we change it so that new members without posts can't include links or attachments of any kind? Please?

I'm sure there are a variety of tactics which could be tried. I agree, it would be good to have something extra.

By the way, I wouldn't recommend a public discussion of countermeasures - the spammers are able to read the forum too. Might be better to use PMs, or email.

Board spam is a huge burden on the administrators.

Somehow I guess they're keeping up, as I've never (well, I think never) seen anything on this particular board, so it's likely been deleted by the time I show up.

You could make new member require approval by admins, but that sucks too. We're small enough that I hate to deter someone. Arguably if they want to be here, they'll suffer through the approval process. But I know we get some fly by folks that chime in on their project, and perhaps never post again. But even then their short stay is worthwhile.

But that's another burden on the admins, to be timely in approval.

Some boards outright ban gmail accounts (and perhaps other popular free-mail), but that can sure be frustrating. I don't know if we have a CAPTCHA system, and even if that would be effective.

And, of course, it's always about what tools the board has to facilitate this.

I think community moderation can work well here. We don't talk enough controversial stuff that folks go and start beating on each other, but simply having an ability to report a post, and then have some heuristic to determine what to do about it. If a post is from a new users, and/or one with a low post count, the software can simply hide the post (and topic if there's just the one post) immediately, and an admin can come by later and clean it up. If it's an older poster, then the post can be elided "this post has been reported, click to open" kind of thing.

This can take the timely burden off the admins, as they can potentially come back at their leisure to clean stuff up.

Each community is different. Ours may be simpler because of the low traffic we have.

Yes, it's very annoying.

For what it's worth, I'd be willing to volunteer as a moderator.

1) I don't think we get so many NEW members that this should be a hassle. But what if we didn't allow new members to post images of any kind (ESPECIALLY IMAGES) until moderator approval.
A moderator should read their history and see if the user has earned the right to post an image or link. If all a user has is "me too" or "Neat idea" type posts, then they cannot post images until they earn it.

2) Members should have some type of "karma" for images to even show. Let's say a new member earned the right to post images. Perhaps don't actually SHOW those images until the reader clicks "show images". The button should also show the source.
This way, I at least have a better chance of not accidentally seeing those images while at work (like I almost did the other day).

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Cat; the other white meat.

I don't know much about modern browsers, (and I won't be surprised if a more-than-a-decade-old Amiga browser would be more sophisticated than a modern one on any other OS), but IBrowse has site-specific preferences, and a "Show Images" command button in the GUI. I bring this up because maybe someone knows how to do this with modern browsers. In IBrowse, I can set up the preferences so that on forum.6502.org, images are not loaded by default. I can then press "Load Images" any time I wish to see the images.

If that can be done (I'm pretty sure it can't on these mobile devices I use), that would be a user-side solution. This site is very readable without the images, anyway.

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I don't know this forum software, but on other sites, users are not able to post images until they have a certain number of posts (not effective in this situation), or until a moderator confirms their account. I don't wish to add work for the moderators.

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I also volunteer to be someone who has the capability to delete a new user in these situations.

Indeed! So, three cheers for Mike N. and Garth for keeping the forum clear! Your efforts should not go un-noticed.

As for new and increased measures against spam, perhaps they're not necessary. It seems to me what we've experienced is just a blip on the graph, not a trend that shows serious cause for concern. Let's not be in a hurry to put up barriers.

-- Jeff

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In 1988 my 65C02 got six new registers and 44 new full-speed instructions!
https://laughtonelectronics.com/Arcana/ ... mmary.html

Very good point - many thanks to the mods!

We have ways to catch spammers. Some are automated and don't even let them finish the sign-up process because of the digital reputation they probably aren't even aware that they've left on the internet. Other times they'll try something sneaky that they don't realize we can catch pretty easily. Most of the spammer deletion goes on without the members even being aware of it. I don't know if I want to describe the ways we have available to us here, since it might give away our advantage if these idiots are reading this. In the recent case, they've tried something else, and I'm sure we'll figure out a way to cut them off at the pass. Regardless, part of discouraging it is like graffiti, where if you remove it before the paint is even dry and before anyone has seen it, it discourages the taggers. It's not just pictures though. It's links too. You'll find nothing charming in what I have to say ought to be done to these vandals.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

I think the forum needs moderators in more than the US timezones. I'm currently a moderator on another forum, and over there we cover the moderation needs by having moderators in three time zones, ~eight hours difference between each (the eastern zone is slightly less covered except when I'm in Japan, otherwise there's only one guy in UTC+9). No reported post stays alive for more than a couple of minutes, in practice.

Adding just an EU timezone moderator (or two) here means there wouldn't be much of a gap for spammers anymore though.

Mike and I are in the same time zone, but our schedules are so different I expect there's only about three hours that we're both sleeping.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

And I'm guessing that I'm awake (albeit not constantly reloading and reading this site) during those three hours.

I'll be hitting the sack in about 7 hours, and waking in about 11.

Still, those offensive posts had been on the forum at least four hours when I noticed them. I don't know when they were deleted, but someone (from Europe, I presume) had already reported them when I logged on.
I firmly believe that only having US-located moderators aren't good enough, not anymore. I've seen the strategies spammers and 'bots use over on that forum where I'm a moderator. They'll find the time slots.

> They'll find the time slots.

Yes, the three attacks we had were progressively earlier in the day, and the response time did go up dramatically as a consequence.

I tried to report them, but I don't know how successful I was. My browser crashed upon submitting the report. I'm not certain why.