SecretLeeds - History, culture and architecture in Leeds

blackprince wrote:Hi,
There is a another suspicious post "Strange underground door" from a user name in Cyrillic. The user name translates as "Hello". It has had 70 views and one member trying to be helpful has replied.

Can we not save ourselves from these nuisance posts by blocking any which contain Cyrillic alphabet characters ?
Spasibo Tovarisch
BP

Hi Black Prince,
unfortunately we can't be as broad brushed as that. I do have the ability to ban specific IP addresses and when cleaning up the Spam I am sorely tempted to do so. However on checking some of the recent spam it turns out the adrress is an Internet Project in Bangalore. I wouldn't want to prevent ex-pats, visitors or genuinely interested residents living in Bangalore from posting by banning what may be their Internet Service Provider.

I have looked up the IP address the new poster registered from and it turns out to belong to Virgin Media which suggests UK based although it is possible to use redirects to mask the original. There is no signature , yet, to include a hypelink and the two posts so far seem to be genuine with no spam content. So despite a slightly suspicious/unusual username I am unable/unwilling to act unless there is evidence of misuse of the site. This may be the post of someone from eastern/south eastern europe who just happens to be residing in Leeds and showing interest in their location.

Cheers

Thanks for giving this your consideration tykebhoy. The Cyrillic "monica" on the post raised some alarm bells with me, given previous spam posts in the same language, but agree the current post does seem to be innocuous.

BP

There are certainly plenty of "Spam" on this site today even though the Moderators to their credit have removed quite a lot of them.

Yes Jack. I have removed about 10 posts and banned a similar number of users today. Other Mods with greater powers than me have completely zapped user accounts of another 10+ users and in doing so getting on for 100 or so posts of those users.

Might it not be better to allow people to register, but vet their first few submissions before allowing them to appear?

I have suggested that but it doesn't appear the software this forum runs on does not have that functionality. It also isn't much of a reduction for the moderators it just reduces the spam everybody else sees. Other alternatives are being considered

I heard about one forum that got rid of Russian spammers by having registration questions that were very rude about Vladimir Putin.

mhoulden wrote:I heard about one forum that got rid of Russian spammers by having registration questions that were very rude about Vladimir Putin.

Did they have a multiple choice on how many elections he has rigged? The options being 10-20, 20-30, 30-40 or more than 40.