Spam

Death to the spambots! that the product is soulfully undully righteous in the outpouring victory that is Dell Computers saving the space program in monotone amounts of hardware and likable venue.

*insert random link to virus-infested site here*

Jay wrote:

But how else will we find out about shoes or handbags?

We have women on this forum, don't we?

stopforumspam.com has a multitude of plugins and APIs, PunBB included.

What are the chances of convincing you to alter or remove this rule from the board?

The following errors need to be corrected before the message can be posted:
At least 120 seconds have to pass between posts. Please wait a little while and try posting again.

I've run into it several times and have never seen such a rule implemented on any other board. It's not hard to write more than one meaningful response withing two minutes, especially when you open multiple threads at once in tabs before reading. I find it a little discouraging as a human poster, and I doubt the spambots really care

I'll shorten it a bit and we'll see how things go.

Just a reminder (spurred by the recent spam post in the FFXIII Piano Collections thread) that any responses to or addressing a spam post in a thread about something else are likely to be deleted.  Besides being off-topic, obviously I am going to delete the spam and when I do any posts addressing it are going to look even more out of place.

If anyone really feels the need to address a spam post and doesn't want to see their own post deleted the best thing to do for now (until I upgrade to forums that let me move posts to a new/different topic) would be to reply here or in a new topic.

As for the spam issue itself, one problem I've seen mentioned is that some amount of spam these days isn't automated but is actually posted by real people who will do the job for cheap in developing countries.  Hence the spam methods getting smarter.

Better spam prevention is something else I'm hoping to accomplish when I upgrade to new forums one of these days.

Qui-Gon Joe wrote:

Actually I wonder how spam of any kind actually generates any business at all...

Pure quantity (someone is going to click it anyway) and SEO (raising ranking on search engine for random terms, to have the before mentioned effect there).