Spam nonsense on Transition Network
By Ed Mitchell 20th October 2010
I am sorry to say that the spam nonsense merchants have become aware of our existence. This does not affect our or your security, but, after a long calm slow launch of the site with no spam, we are now beginning to see nonsense, idiots and cheapskate marketeers creeping in like the shady lowlifes that they are. It’s a sign of us growing up.
This is all an unfortunate and boring issue with working on the internet, and why we require a confirmation mail to our registrations, have to have the ‘Captchas’ to check if you are a human, and other ways of separating humans from machines. We know it’s annoying, but look at that graph below – that’s the nonsense that we are spared by the Captchas…
We have a clear ‘No nonsense’ policy on this site, so these comments lead to instant deletion and the user being banned; you just need to point us at them and we’ll deal with them with ‘extreme prejudice’.
Machines that do spam – we have a machine for them
This graph is a screengrab of our spam collector, mollom. Mollom keeps out most of the drivel.
As you can see, it’s busy. For some reason, the spam nonsense started in earnest in late August. We’re not sure why this is, but it is.
We’re very glad mollom exists!
Sadly, there are humans who also send spam
This comes in the form of stupid and/or marketing comments on posts in the forums, and some people receiving stupid and/or marketing contact emails. They can do this as they register as they are humans (believe it or not), and then send this ghastly boorish heinous rubbish. These people are either ‘trolls’ who are just totally pointless, or ‘lowlife marketeers’ who think you’ll buy whatever rubbish it is they are offering you.
Your email addresses are safe – we use a system called ‘single blind’ messaging, so you can see the sender’s address but they can’t see yours. So you do not need to worry about these lowlifes getting your address via our site.
If you receive one of these mails, or see one of these stupid posts, please report them and we will annihilate them on site. You can report nonsense by:
- Forwarding the mail to the web project
- Clicking on the ‘flag as nonsense’ link below every news item/blog post/comment on the site
If you want to help beyond that, you are welcome to become a forum administrator who can remove these stupid comments – please get in touch if you are responsible and wouldn’t mind being part of a moderators group. That would be very useful indeed.