Spam...

[Grandpa Bambu]

There has been a few spammers on the boards as of late. The administrators are doing their best to keep the Site clean.

Spamming will not be tollerated and offenders will be banned without question...

Merle said he may have to tweak the member registration a tad. 

GB

[jc71]

This site is better than ever!

[Grandpa Bambu]

This site is better than ever!

Yeah, the new BBS prog is awesome.

Thanks Merle! 

GB

[ddaavviiddd]

what exactly is spam ?

[Grandpa Bambu]

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, undesired bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, and mobile phone messaging spam.

Spamming in an internet forum is when a user posts a message that is off-topic, has little relevance to the subject being discussed, or is a post that fails to contribute to the thread. Lastly, there is also the case where a person posts messages solely for the purpose of increasing his forum ranking.

GB

[headheldhigh01]

most of it is actually probably done by bots rather than people.  somebody writes a program and it crawls the web looking for forum signups like for here, then posts to available pages.  it can be tough to fight, because if you lock it out, the bot just comes back with a new user account the next time, which is why you see a lot of sites make you type in some seriously visually distored text off a graphic image as a key for signing up, because the bots have a hard time reading the graphics with optical character recognition and stay locked out.  unfortunately that doesn't stop the ones designed for email, though both use the same kinds of spelling errors etc in order to not get kept out by filters. 

according to a friend of mine, email spam has apparently jumped from two thirds of all traffic to probably in the 90%'s.  lot of it comes from out of the country as well, it's a tough fight