What is it with nutters (and worse)targeting this forum?

[Hotpot]

Wot is with this forum that seems to make it so perennial a target for fraudsters and low-lifes?

There was the major hacking job that brought it crashing down (and when resurrected, all earlier posts were gone.) Then many of us had that weird email I mentioned on here a couple of years back, some deranged saddo hitting forum members' post-boxes. And now there's this latest oddity,viz:

Email received today ostensibly from webmaster@lanazarote.com notifying me that a thread I've subscribed to has just received a newly posted message. The thread is

BBC1 / BBC2 / ITV / C4 & C5.

Well yes, a thread of that name was launched in February 2009 by a newly registered user who never posted again. The thread looked like a fishing trip for commercial purposes. The thread was effectively killed off thanks to the nature of responses it received. There was certainly no reason for anyone to remember it, still less reply to it.

I didn't remember it, and I rarely visit here anyway now, but the email just received from webmaster@lanzarote.com inevitably triggered an alarm here. It hasn't, therefore, been opened.

However, looking through its contents, the "reply" to that thread is nothing of the kind, but a random text compilation familiar to anyone with experience of spammers and scammers.

Hopefully, the security of this forum has not been impaired, and that what's happened here is one of those minor glitches that can occur when a spammer hits a forum thread, their post is quickly deleted by admin, but the system automatically kicks out a message to thread subscribers even though the subject matter has already vanished.

(Needless to add, there has been no new post on the BBC1 BBC2 etc etc thread since July 30th, 2009.)

[Webby]

It was a spam comment. Because the website and forum and very well ranked in the search engines, we're constantly targeted by spammers who want to get links to their very dubious sites seen here by the search engines.

It's an almost never ending job removing them - sometimes hundreds each day.

[Hotpot]

Thanks for that, Webby, it certainly did have all the hallmarks of a spam message that had been deleted by admin but auto-generation kicking in at the same time.

Spammers, of course, waste their time by targeting fora but as they're so fundamentally stupid anyway, they don't ever realise it.

It's a shame this forum is under the kind of pressure you mention because of all the effort required to police these lunatics. I wish there was an easy solution but fear there isn't: a lot of newbies will land on here with legitimate questions, so it's impossible to filter 'em until after the content of their post has appeared.

Good luck and, again, sincere thanks.

[Webby]

As long as Google places a value on links from high traffic sites, then they'll keep coming. More often than not, "they" are bots rather than people.

[Hotpot]

Well the bots are back again. Same spam as before, same auto email notification from the forum re hat subscribed thread. I've now unsubscribed from all threads.