Spam

[lyledunn]

Kurnal, I subscribe to the IET wiring regs forum from which I often get tit bits of info that is of interest on the fire safety side of things. The forum has been under spam attack for months now and the IET IT dept do not seem to have got to grips with it. Can you tell me if this is a relatively easy thing to overcome or something so difficult that it takes those at the forefront of technology months to sort out?

[Owain]

Kurnal, I subscribe to the IET wiring regs forum from which I often get tit bits of info that is of interest on the fire safety side of things. The forum has been under spam attack for months now and the IET IT dept do not seem to have got to grips with it. Can you tell me if this is a relatively easy thing to overcome or something so difficult that it takes those at the forefront of technology months to sort out?

(I am not Kurnal) It depends on the will, and the underlying forum software. In the case of the IET forum blocking multiple posts from new posters, or posts with +91 in the subject line, would do the trick - at least for a while. Blocking repeated registrations from similar IP addresses is also fairly straightforward.

[kurnal]

Hi I am not the webmaster- Colin Simpson (firenet) always deals with issues like this. However it's key to keep the software up to date and my golden bullet is to take control of all new applications for membership and approve each one individually. This of course limits the new members but you only get members who want to  join for the right reasons. I found that without taking such an approach we were being spammed at a rate of 1 per minute, my way takes just 5mins  per day. Another useful tool is a freeware program called spamkiller which filters out known rogue IPs but takes up about 15 minutes a day.

[lyledunn]

Many thanks guys. Not knowing the solution it is churlish to criticise. This has been going on for months so I can only assume that either it is very difficult to fix or they simply couldn't give a damn!