More and more spam threads are coming up in the forum

Report, report, report.

And..You only saw two? I am reporting 5 as we speak.

Yep, they need to reinstate the membership fee to get rid of all the riff-raff.

I totally agree. A $1 fee is affordable for everyone and it stops all that spammy garbage and makes life easier for the mods and us as members.

No, it's not just you. As you can imagine, there is a lot going on behind-the-scenes that the new owners / admins are working on. It's actually pretty mind-boggling on how many details they are dealing with at the moment.

One of these details is the amount of spam this forum is getting hit with. There are already some spam blockers in place and they are currently working on getting more. There also seems to be some spam opportunity seekers who see this transition time as the perfect time to drop their spam here. Some sub-forums are getting hit harder than others.

The best thing you can do about this is to report them. I must have nuked over 100 spam accounts over the past couple of days and I'm only one of many forum moderators. We're getting to them as fast as we can.

Currently, it's a moving target, which I'm confident the new admins will pin down and deal with.

RoD

One more vote here for a $1 membership fee to join the WF

I've flagged at least 20 posts today

Cookies Stuffing, Spam, advertsing, the lot!

Defiantly Charge $1

I wish they forum will heed to your advice on this..

One note guys; as you flag, keep adding fresh, new content, and keep these threads popping, to dwarf the spam

Got my $1 vote as a big YES.

In my opinion, a fee isn't the way to deal with things.

In a forum I'm a member of the spam was dealt with by having new members have to have their posts approved by mods. After 3 posts of this, the restriction was lifted.

I appreciate the new owners are working on many things at one time. Eventually, I would vote for anything and everything that might help.

* $5 joining fee. Still affordable worldwide. New revenue could hire more "human" spam removers.

* No links of any kind allowed in posts or signatures for first 30 days and first 30 posts.

Another possibility might be: 1) Free members = no links ever; 2) War room members = may add links in posts and signatures in any forum

Add a question and answer challenge on registration page, end of spam.

Asking for even a buck for registration is too much, that will greatly reduce the number of genuine registering users and i don't think thats what the administration team would want neither would the people offering WSOs.

Make the question especially hard that you need to google for the answer and see the spam end. Also keep coming up with new one after a couple days. There are other forums on the internet and none i know charge for registration to keep spam out so there are obviously better ways to handle this issue

Just flagged another spam post. Looks like it was the same pesky bugger...

The worrying part is that it's most definately bots who cause this, this shouldn't really be hard to protect against for a company like freelancer

Once I help the prince from Nigeria who just emailed me get his $77 million into the country, I'll just distribute it to these forum spammers and they'll all go find a new hobby.

Now...all of this talk about spam has made me hungry.

I'm probably not visiting this forum enough to have noticed any significant increase in SPAM. (Although I have noticed it on my own blog, so maybe it's a web wide issue?)

Having said that, the idea of asking $X during subscription doesn't seem a good idea to me. Although I'm not a marketing guru , I am rather deep into figuring out all this IM stuff in the context of my eBook business. That's one of the reasons I'm here. And I read a lot about marketing. Over the last week I read at least 3 times the same example in different books/blogs or whatever :

They proposed to people 2 types of chocolates. The first one for $0.50 and the second one for $1. Of course the cheaper one sold more. But the difference was "reasonable". Let's say 3 to 1 (don't remember the exact figures). Than, they reduced both by $0,50 . So one was $0 and the other one was $0,50. The sales of nr 2 just disappeared.

Conclusion, there is a HUGE difference between FREE and not free. Be it even $0,01.

Paying a (small) entrance fee will VERY significantly reduce the nr of subscribers.And because this forum has recently been bought by investors I don't think they will be very pleased with LESS subscribers.

We're into a marketing forum aren't we? So what sounds better?

-The biggest FREE internet forum in the world... OR
-The biggest paid internet forum on internet....

So before taking any drastic measures, I think it would be wise to determine the seize of the problem. I have no idea how many posts are made on average on this forum. 100? 500? 1000 day? And if there is only 0,5% spam in there , I don't think making it paid will be the best solution.


PS: I would pay $1, but I'm just one on XXX thousands.....

Just report them that is what I usually do.

...or prohibit new members from posting links...

I guess there are already enough suggestions in this thread which would help to prevent some or even some more spam here on the forum. Now we need to wait and see which suggestions are getting pushed through!

I saw a reply in another language when I opened the WF today…

I guess that more spam filters and our help reporting spam will solve the problem.

I don't think that the newbies will like the idea of paying a fee to use the forum, even if it is only $1.

The traffic will drop = less sales for those who have a WSO, and more problems that the forum owners will prefer to avoid.

Do you people realize how many of the WSOs offered here are for backlink packages?
Yes, you all do, and you all know exactly how those are generated.

This is NIMBY at its finest.

Yeah, you got my vote for at least $1 entrance fee. That will kill most it.

All I know is that it's been coming in hard and the moderator on duty is sleeping at the wheel.

If this Forum is run on WHM/cPanel then there are tools that stops this JUNK....

Try ConfigServer, it's an OpenSource Firewall that runs on WHM and can specify IP's or specific countries to ban (i.e. Russian and Nigeria), two of the ones I'm seeing propagating SPAM here...

Another product for WHM is cPHulk, another FREE OpenSource product that takes care of locking out IP's that are recurring problems...

I use those on my Dedicated Server and it stops 99.9% of attacks and bots trying to penetrate my systems....

Just my .02 cents...

I vote for the membership fee..the $5.00 seems a more realistic and affordable though..but at the end of the day the new owners will decide what way to go.

But please Admin, sort these annoying spammer/spambots out

They even spammed this thread a moment ago... LOL. Bring back the fee, heck I'll even pay it again to get rid of this crap.

The paid membership suggestions could be a problem for the new admin.

Historically the forum has been paid annual fee, and paid lifetime membership, at various times.

I would be surprised if the new admin would have the records of which members fit which category, so it could be too hard to implement.

It also detracts from the business model new admin has for the forum, they are the owners, and they will steer the ship the way they see fit.

It is only a bit of spam, although annoying, that's life, get on with it.

One option that wouldn't lock out those that "need" the forum but don't have any $$ is to set up a "paid" option through Paypal for a 20 year free trial.

That would stop bots and real live spammers may think twice before spamming when they have to go through PP. This would eliminate refund issues or chargebacks for the company of other paid options but there may still be a PayPal charge associated with even a free trial that the forum would need to pay.

Mark

Actually the number of Spam is increasing deadly day by day. The authority should take care on the post as early as possible, after getting report/ flag.

Ho do you know the spammers might not pay the $1 so they can keep spamming?

I think it's already begun.

Before the changeover, we had a near-perfect running forum. Great Mods, forum functionality that worked, and very little spam.

We had member mods more than willing to do their part, back then. Why bother reporting it now, when nothing is done for hours, at times.

The only real problem was the server issues.

The server issues have now been fixed.

The spam is out of control for hours on end.

Forum functionality is poor at best.

Long-time members are no longer around - can't blame them.

As a matter of fact, another forum is looking much more appealing every day.

I may be in the minority, but the spam doesn't bother me in the least.
The spam posts are so blatantly obvious that it's easy to ignore them.
Perhaps new members should be required to make a "good faith" deposit,
from which a deduction is made for each spam message they post?