Spammers

[MaryMary]

Timezone!!

Still, that puts you awake and operable ... at the time I flagged them... (let's see...) 7:30 am, your time? Maybe 8:00?

I'm a night owl. I flagged them around 2:30 am.

Thanks for flagging them up!

Oh, no thanks necessary!! Thanks to you for "taking out the trash."

 

[zigs]

Becky beat me to it

 

[Beth_B]

They're ba-a-ack!!! Already reported...


Edited to add: How does a bot join a forum?

Yes how DOES a bot manage the capcha thing especially if it's a tricky one to decipher?

*When I ran a board it was from 1999 to the late 90s and we didn't have capcha...we had to weed offenders out by hand, or automatically put every new member on moderate so their first posts had to be approved...which was off-putting to new members and disrupted the flow of conversation as posts would usually not go through right away. I did have a mod in France as well as both coasts here, which helped! But all in all it could get tedious.

(I understand if this is somewhat proprietary information admin may not want to disclose here. )

 

[marlingardener]

When I helped moderate another gardening forum, we could identify the point of origin and the IP of the spammer. Then the webmaster could ban the little twerp. I once offered to go to India and bang someone's head against a table, but the webmaster wouldn't spring for round-trip airfare. He did offer me a one-way prepaid ticket.

 

[zigs]

Yes how DOES a bot manage the capcha thing especially if it's a tricky one to decipher?

You know, i'm not sure about that one Even I can't get past some of them

When I helped moderate another gardening forum, we could identify the point of origin and the IP of the spammer. Then the webmaster could ban the little twerp. I once offered to go to India and bang someone's head against a table, but the webmaster wouldn't spring for round-trip airfare. He did offer me a one-way prepaid ticket.

Webmaster on the other forum had threats from a couple of trolls a while back, they were making it personal and threatening his business too.

He used their email to back track them to the forum they were planning the attack from, joined it under a false name, found selfies of both of them and then pasted them onto the gardening forum.

The effect was brilliant, back on their forum they were trying to work out how he got pics of them

A little more digging came up with their real names and addresses, he went round to one of the houses with a couple of big lads, the troll refused to come out, hiding behind his mummy

Attacks stopped after that