Spam on Manhattan Board - any other regions?

[sgordon]

The last couple days the Manhattan board has been inundated with spam posts advertising a livestream Rugby website or something. Any other boards getting this?

Chowhound site sysops: maybe you need to have a blocker set up, so that posts with certain words won't go through (i.e. the way on other sites posts with cussin' won't work - like, I remember one site so strict that it would deny any posts with the word "cocktail" even...) - in this case, "rugby" would be the word, but you could always use it to block other spam in the future...

[The Chowhound Team]

We're getting spam on multiple boards and it's been happening for some time now, as discussed in this thread http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/862831. If you see one, you can hit "report" (you only have to report a particular spammer once, it's not necessary to report all of their posts) and we'll remove the posts as soon as we can. We don't staff the site 24/7 so some spam may sit for a while before a moderator removes it.

There was a recent change that has significantly reduced the number of spammer registrations, but unfortunately (as Jacquilynne says here http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/8628... ) the spammers who are actual people, as opposed to bot-nets, have no problems passing those checks. The kind of arms race you can get into with spammers is expensive and time-consuming and tends to alienate actual users, as well, since it invariably involves making participation in the site more difficult.

[Servorg]

"The kind of arms race you can get into with spammers is expensive and time-consuming and tends to alienate actual users, as well, since it invariably involves making participation in the site more difficult."

Just so long as drinking cocktails isn't curtailed I don't mind if you tighten up the process of talking about them (just as a for instance - I don't think you would ever actually ban the word "cock" from this site as there are way, way, way too many food uses of the word for that to ever happen here) to make it harder for the carpet bombing spamfuckwits to tout rugby on the boards (although, come to think of it, it's no wonder they have to resort to wholesale spamming in a misguided effort to make rugby more popular here in the US...it will never happen). ;-D>

[Veggo]

They come in waves on many boards. I'm sure the tech folks are devising a defense. I would think that a mechanism that detected at least two threads posted by the same poster within say 5 minutes on any boards, and then automatically deleted them, would rid us of part of the nuisance. Legitimate users who knew the drill could work within it.