So frustrating to see such an attack of spam bright and early on a Monday morning (in Europe). This time the spammer didn't wait for the weekend to roll around, s/he just waited for the late hour of the week day. Maybe it's time to get a 24/7 system to take this stuff down.
And no, I didn't count how many spams there were but there are a lot. Off to drive Slea Head today.
Yes, there's a lot of it. Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam. Spam Spam, Bacon and Spam.
Over 200. No, I did not count them, just multiplied the number of pages (nearly five) by 50 entries per page.
It's gone now, is everybody happy?
Wake up webmaster! It's happening again after midnight pacific time. For those of us in Europe right now we have to wade through hundreds of these posts until you wake up.
And I know I shouldn't be on the travel forum so much when I'm over here traveling...but that's another story.
Maybe the webmaster needs to negotiate with this person or "business" (it's clearly coming form one place), as in, what would it take for them to place their ad for fraudulent services, which no one here can understand anyway, only once?
negotiation with criminals is useless
Rick Steves is not a big corporation, they do not have overnight shifts working. Give the poor webmaster a few hours to sleep, I'm sure his/her job is intense enough during their normal work day. They do have spam catcher software at work but nothing is perfect and things get through. Annoying spam on a forum is definitely a first world problem.
They should be able to configure a filter that will block posts with larger than a certain percentage of non-English characters.
I can't imagine these forums generate much income to the bottom line, if any, and considering that we pay no monthly fee to use the Travel Forums, I think it's presumptuous and whiny to tell the Webmaster to work extra shifts on the weekend, or to implement additional software to the website. Just scroll past the spam folks, it ain't going to kill you.
Elaine is right. Takes just a few seconds to scroll past the spam.
@Elaine. I'm not a whiny person. The "wake up" part was said in jest (I guess I need to start using a winking emoticon). The frustration part wasn't directed at me but the poor webmaster who now has to face overnight spammers as well as the typical weekend spammers we seem to see.
I know Mona. She's not whiny in the least. She's wonderful actually.
Maybe it's time for the webmaster to give some users "super user" status. It would give such users the ability to segregate the spam posts and keep them from showing on the forums. When the webmaster shows up in the morning s/he could check the posts and delete the relevant spam and allow legitimate posts to flow through. Super users performance would be monitored and if found to be abusing their privileges such privileges would be revoked.
I would hope the immediate removal of spam would end the behavior.
