Sadly Ashley, we will always have to put up with some of this to make sure the fourms are a full and free exchange of ideas. As you know I personally find it an irritation that I would like to do something about but without affecting the forums themselves.

A delay of the emails coming in to 11am would not be a problem and might in fact be better for me in the UK. Good lunchtime reading and response when the work allows.

Restricting who can post or using moderators will certainly affect the use of forums.  People like to see their posts straight away and evidence that the exchange of thoughts is uninterupted and uncensored. Paying third parties to monitor, given that, from my perspective, the issue is not a major inconveience, does not seem to make economic sense (unless your team are deleting large quantities of adverts in the bacground).  Moderating I think should come much later in the options

Restricting who can post to subscribers rather than free membership would also restrict the free exchange - so not preferred.

Restricting certain membership groups (eg unpaid) to a few posts each day or, say one an hour, may have the greatest affect on advertisers without restricting the response levels to posts. Certainly the advertisers would not find it easy.

Hunting the advertisers down is far more satisfying.  Do you have the advertisers address, do we have any members in located nearby?

Keep up the good works

Tony Addison
Free-rein

Hi John

That's fine for *form* spamming (a separate problem we also need to deal with as it happens) but not much good for *forum* spamming - the spammers are all real humans...

Ashley

Ashley,

Take it as a compliment that e-Consultancy is seen to have such an authoratitive voice that it is seen as an ideal place to spam :-)

Try and avoid restricting real posts in any way though. The value of this forum is the ability to exchange views or advice and the more that 'casuals' use the forum the greater the chance that they will see the value of becoming a paid for member and hunt down their credit card. A delay in posting will just irritate your real users with the nagging doubt that their post has disappeared into unconnected bytes somewhere. It won't stop the spammers and you've still got to delete their contributions so no saving there. Those browsing the forum in real time will just filter out the garbage mentally.

Your suggestion of delaying the digest till 11.00 sounds like a great solution with the beauty of being the simplest. And if the spammers go away then you can move it forward again.

Colin Cooper
ISSEL - Pilot Software
Aligning Execution with Strategy
+44 (0)870 166 2435

Ashley,

If you haven't already seen this, you may be interested in an article from today's Guardian.  I've pasted the link below.  It discusses the possibility of e-mail becoming a paid-for service in order to eradicate spam.  I'd be interested to hear your thoughts and those of anyone else on the forum.

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/spam/story/0,,1756720,00.html

All best,

Rob

On 13:45:25 19 April 2006 Ashley wrote:

Some of you may have noticed that we seem to be attracting more forum spammers these days. Which is a particular pain when those forum posts then get included in our e-mail alerts. 

You have to regsiter to post to our forum but this does not seem to be deterring the spammers as much as it used to. Mostly the spammers are from the US and China (at the moment) and they spam the forum in the middle of our night (UK). 

We delete the posts in the morning and disable the spammers' user profiles but it is too late for the alert e-mails which are generated at 0500 UK time. 

So what should we do...? A few options:

- We change the time the alert e-mails go out (e.g. to 1100 UK time) so that we can delete the spam before it is included in the e-mail alerts.
- We approve / moderate any post before it goes live (so you wouldn't be able to post in 'real time'.) 
- We put in restrictions such as only being able to post 1 thing per day unless you are a subscriber

- We restrict access to the forum, or to posting, to our paying subscribers only
- We pay an external agency/resource to monitor the forum 24hrs a day
- We hunt down the spammers and beat them the death with baseball bats until everyone else gets the message...

Currently we're thinking of starting with the first item listed above before escalating through the others...

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com