Spam cleanup...

[Robert_Moriyama]

With my newly-granted Forum SUPERPOWERS, I have cleanup up all the spam posts I could find this morning (Saturday Feb. 5) and deleted the 38(!) or so spammer userids added on February 4th and 5th(!). There may be hundreds more spammer userids in the Memberlist...

The admin functions let you see the code for 'interests' and signatures and such and favorites among the spambots include the usual (steroids, pseudoviagra, casinos, 'free' movies or software, etc.) but also oddities like muscle car restoration, tourism (yeah, nothing makes me want to visit a place like spam!) for VietNam(!?), and coupons.

My suspicion is that there are a lot of people out there whose machines have been infected with spyware, trojan horses, and spambots, and some of them have visited Aphelion and posted in the forum. So let us one and all run a security sweep, preferably with multiple tools (e.g., Norton AND Spybot and...) in case we are unwittingly hosting Evil Parasites.

RM

[Robert_Moriyama]

That one was a pain in the South 40. One topic had at least 8 copies of the post in it...

[Robert_Moriyama]

Near as I can tell, that userid was added again, and made 67 more identical posts. Another userid made a post in almost every month's folder from 2004 to the present. There went about an hour I'll never get back...

[doc]

Bringing better technology to bear is definitely on my to-do list. It's just a matter of me finding the right amount of time.