Hi everyone,
Thanks to everyone for your patience with the occasional spam that makes its way into our forum. As has happened many times over the years, spam influxes will come and go. In fact, spammers may be reading this right now and saying "Ha ha, I'm such a jerk! My life's work is so meaningful!" /s
Sometimes we make changes to improve our ability to combat that spam. This is one of those times.
We've adjusted how you can register for an account, we've added restrictions to new members (that most legit new members shouldn't notice), and I'm now capable of making changes much faster to be more reactive to various situations. What classifies as a new member? I can't tell you. What are the new controls? I can't tell you that either! Otherwise, we'd just be informing spammers (jerks!) how to circumvent our controls. No, I won't tell you privately either, forum regulars. ;)
As a reminder -- because it's been done -- please don't mention any specifics of our spam controls on the public boards. Most of you are quite skilled at figuring such things out over the course of their posting history, and that's fine. If someone's having trouble in our forum, please don't 'help' by publicly stating anything about our spam controls. Please direct them my way for assistance (PM or email to webmaster @ rick...).
I hope your takeaway is A) we're doing something about spam and B) if you run into a limitation in the forum that you never ran into before, please let me know! While I expect most of you will never notice, our controls may not be perfect, and I want to make adjustments to ensure our legitimate forum members aren't impacted (or only impacted in rare cases).
Also, I've seen people start new daily threads to indicate spam that has been reported. I appreciate the idea behind it, and I'm sorry that you felt it necessary to do so because of the recent influx, but the people that would benefit the most -- those who would click a spam link -- likely aren't checking it. In the end, it's just another thing we have to remove.
We sincerely appreciate everyone's use of the Report system, and hopefully it's super simple, fast, and easy for you to use. We check every Report, and it's the best way to ensure that spam or behavioral issues are handled.
Thanks to you all for making this a great place to discuss travel.