On Spammers

[markem]

Dear Cigar Asylum Community,

Y'all are great. Y'all are the best. In fact, so bestest that others are trying to ruin the fun. We have many, many spammers trying to infiltrate our site.

Usually, we catch them before they make their first post. However, sometimes not. We are currently under an attack where over 75 spammer accounts were created today and they are still creating accounts!

You can help us out by not publicly acknowledging them. Do not respond when they post. Just report the post. Posting in the thread, which is almost always a public thread that can be found from google, and including the original post makes the username searchable, even if we delete the spammer's post and account. We suspect that this encourages spammers to continue their actions and share the site name as a place that is fun to mess with.

We are investigating ways to modify our account creation procedures to make it harder for spammers but not harder for legitimate inmates who want to join the fun. If we make any changes that affect legitimate users, we will let everyone know the details and motivations.

On behalf of the ToE
--bunion

[markem]

Hi everyone.

We now require moderator approval for new accounts. Hopefully, this won't slow the new user process by more than a day, worst case. This is standard on many other boards, so we suspect that it won't drive new users away.

[jonumberone]

Can we submit lists to the moderators of people that are here we want removed?

[markem]

Originally Posted by jonumberone

Can we submit lists to the moderators of people that are here we want removed?

We've always allowed that. We've also pretty much ignored them. <-- seems appropriate

[Brian D.]

It's been fun for me to troll them with the old "So, spammername, have you ever [whatever] in a Turkish prison?"

I will cut that out, but icehog or some other "suit" here needs to bring coloring books or something else childishly amusing to me at Shack.

[sepp]

Originally Posted by Brian D.

I will cut that out, but icehog or some other "suit" here needs to bring coloring books or something else childishly amusing to me at Shack.

Pickup Sticks or Jax?

[icehog3]

Originally Posted by Brian D.

It's been fun for me to troll them with the old "So, spammername, have you ever [whatever] in a Turkish prison?"

I will cut that out, but icehog or some other "suit" here needs to bring coloring books or something else childishly amusing to me at Shack.

I'll bring IBQTEE.