Spammers

With the dirty spammer who crop up here some times could we not publish their email addresses?

With the dirty spammer who crop up here some times could we not publish their email addresses?

Interesting idea – but is publishing mydisposable.address at gmail.com of any use?

Even worse, many spammers hijack insecure computers or falsify the address so the owner of the address given may be totally innocent.

Unfortunately there are sweat-shops out east where slaves (for want of a better description) are paid peanuts to manually solve captchas and other such sequences so spammers can spam.

There is a “create account” to my ARMwiki but I have hacked the PHP to hide it and remove mention of it from the site because even though it says in big letters that you must be manually approved before you can edit, I would get several account creations per day (and this is a small-scale wiki!). Prior to this, I was spammed with absolute rubbish (toe rings? seriously?). It saddens me to make my wiki less accessible than I would like, however for every good person there are several dozen w****rs. It’s the same in real life, which is why you invite friends around to your place, but you don’t leave the door open…
<sigh>

The best thing, besides trading off accessibility vs protection, is to just ignore the spam. It sucks. It is annoying. But where there is a way, some snot-faced loser will find a way to manipulate it.

As pointed out above – the spammers use various tricks but, in the main, the things you see here are done by actual real people. There are two kinds of e-mail addresses they use; either real ones from hijacked accounts, or temporary accounts created just for the purpose of sending out spam.

Revealing spammer e-mail addresses is therefore essentially pointless. You may either be revealing the address of an innocent person with a compromised e-mail account, or the address of something that probably doesn’t exist anymore by the time you try and send anything to it. Worse, in some cases sending any traffic to that e-mail address is like setting up a beacon saying “there’s somebody here” – the end result may be intensification of spam rather than lessening of it.

Bottom line: We just have to live with it and manually clear it up.

Looking at a recent new-user cookery posting, and then the description of what Aldershot is for, I wonder if it is actually technically possible to spam this forum!

Simplest way to lower the spam rate is to e-mail a verification link to the registered address. Very few spammers bother verifying.