New changes on our boards

We get a lot of spam attempts on our open boards everyday. Spammers seem to have forums of their own to coordinate their efforts, and they methodically post spam links in places where they think they can get away with it.

They began by hiding messages in slower moving boards, mostly in posts at the bottom of the TOC. I developed scripts which sniffed out their posting patterns and placed them on automatic ban lists so they couldn't place 100 spam posts before getting caught. My apologies to some of our regular legit posters got caught in these hair trigger filters and found themselves banned.

The spam filters I created and maintained slowed them down, and we had quite a few successes with shutting down international groups of these spammers by the creation of automated spam reporting to their ISPs. But our database of banned spammers grew daily, into a list of thousands. And this cat and mouse game where we create filters and they find ways to bypass them, and our dealing with reporting to ISPs (even if mostly automated) is time consuming.

One of the primary motivations for spamming message boards the creation of hyperlinks to their sites. They believe that the more inbound links they have from sites all over the world, especially good sites like ours ;-) , the easier it is to climb in Google rankings. The aim is to get to the top of the list and be easy to find.

To make it a whole lot less interesting for spammers, I've decided to phase out the automatic hyperlink feature, and gradually remove almost all URL hyperlinking possibilities like the "Optional Link URL" and "Link Title" box.

Eventually, only initiating posts will be allowed hyperlinks - initiating posts get placed at the top of the TOC and any spam is easily noticeable.