Spam

[greendefender123]

Hi guys think someone is spamming us again. Looks like a profile has been taken over.

[simmitc]

He's been banned

[Blaketon]

If I knew where a spammer lived, I'd like to fill a tank with slurry and empty it through their front door, with the words "Have back some of the S*** you've been sending". I'm sure they'ed go crying to the Police straight away . Judging by most of the spam I see, some people really need to get a life.

Computers and the Internet can be a useful tool but I don't know that I can think of many other tools, that are so misused and so addictive to some. When I was persuaded to join Facebook, I remember wondering "Who is interested in what I'm doing?" I have since cancelled my account, as there was so much utter drivel on there; I'm sure some post it on Facebook, if they go to spend a penny . Posting that you are checking in at an airport, en route to a fortnights holiday, also puzzled me - what an invitation to burglars.

[palacebear]

Most of the spam that reaches the forum is probably sent unknowingly. You receive a spam email of a certain type. Open it by accident. It harvests the contents of your address book and forwards itself to every contact you store. If you use that email address as your forum logon, the forum then becomes exposed to the spam as well.

Thanks to my now closed facebook account, I receive approximately 8 spam emails each day, usually concerning on-line casinos, cheap viagra (as if !), lonely housewives, free porn sites, or capital investment schemes in Indonesia. My mail filters are set to store them in 'junk' if the originators' address is not a regular contact or non-UK. From 'junk' I can preview and delete each mail, and block the sender, without opening the mail.

[geoberni]

I don't know how this forum is managed, but stopping spam can be hard work.
What will keep the levels down in this forum is the authorisation process for opening an account.

I'm a Moderator on a very well used Health & Safety Forum http://www.healthandsafetytips.co.uk/forums/
used by a great many people, both H&S professionals of all levels of experience and often members of the general populace with a question about something they think isn't quite right.
The person who runs the site puts in a great deal of work to keep it running as smoothly as he can and he has a great deal of filters and others setting to block spam.
That being the case, we still get days when there are random Spam posts made that are promoting everything from male enhancement little blue pills to handbags, trainers and oddly, fitted kitchens. Go figure!
Sometimes they are UK based, but more frequently from a Spam Farm in the Philippines or India/Pakistan/Indochina region.
There are Bots out there making concerted efforts to harvest emails. Any Forum that allows non-members to view topics/posts is susceptible to having emails harvested. That's why you should use an email in a post.

[GeordieDave]

If you receive a high amount of spam, use one of these websites below to see if your email address is one of the millions that have been harvested in recent internet security breaches. Two of mine are on the list!

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/p ... sonal-info

https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Some emails contain a tiny image, one pixel in size, that allows the sender to see that you've opened the email and when you opened it, which verifies that your email address is a genuine one. To stop this, always set your email settings to 'never download images' or turn off 'always download images' (or similar) and hopefully you'll drop off the list of emails spammers use, eventually.