Thanks again guys for your support and help at weeding out spam. We now have enough users in all the time zones to pretty much guarantee that enough users will be on shift at almost any time of the day to promptly shoot down spam. Saves me a lot of time and effort, and results in much cleaner boards for all.
If one of our problems is that links are getting picked up by google, would anybody here object to some client-side javascript de-obfuscation?
Google's spiders will see the page that is served, with, say, '[BLF link] www#dealextreme#com [/BLF]', while we see 'www.dealextreme.com'. It should be a fairly straightforward and lightweight bit of code.
Hi devman, thanks for the suggestion. I personally don't mind linking to good companies and deals, as well as other sites that provide useful information about some product we are discussing. It's just that we don't want to help out the spammers' cause.
Another option might be ref=nofollow links for the domain names of the bad guys.
We must de-incentivize the importation of Specially Prepared Assorted Meats to our conversation-space!
Actully, after today's little spam-attack, I started thinking perhaps we could pick a middle-ground between the old and new systems. I realize that Mr. Admin just slipped in a new system, so consider this 'future suggestions in case things "Get Bad(R)" '
If someone has a post marked as spam 5 times, it's unpublished and his spammer rating increases by one
If someone has 3 or more posts unpublished (spammer rating > 3), future posts only require 3 spam flags to unpublish.
The account spammer-rating is invisible to end users, and is reduced by one every month.
All links are marked as 'no-follow' for the first 24 hours.
The system would be self-correcting over time (incorrect account flags expire), invisible to the end user, and should make it easier to clean up the board when these attacks occur during low-traffic hours.
Whew. Venting complete, I feel like I kinda sorta contributed, and... time to go shopping online. Oooh! discount viagra!