Working at Home on the Internet

Closing the Working at Home Forum

 Well the coin has finally landed… and it came up Tails. The Forum must Go.

Due to the fact that Spam and Spammer Members have overwhelmed my Forum, I will be closing it effective 1/1/7.

 

I have gotten almost 700 Spam Posts within 2 weeks, that is about 50 per day, even though the sign-up was set to “human only standards” ie. visual verification and email verification by the potential members. There seem to be an awful lot of people willing to lower their standards and go through the steps of verifying themselves in order to Spam the Forum.

This lead to having to deal not only with the bogus “members” but every bit of Spam they posted. There was up to 10 or more posts each by the time I went to monitor new posts (multiple times a day). That was just the ones that got through the original sign-up process.

 

I then tried using Administrator Approval, but then my Admin email started building up with pending approval mail. This Did Not solve the problem, it just moved it to my mailbox. There is no way to directly approve/disapprove a pending membership. I can only Approve them, then go to the Admin Page to Delete them. This is ridiculous, what’s the point of Administrator Approval if the only thing you can do is approve, not disapprove?

 

I have given up. I don’t have the time or energy to deal with this much aggravation.

 

I may restart the forum sometime in the future, but it seems unlikely unless someone comes up with a better way to handle Spam Posts and Member Sign-up.

As far as I know there is nothing like Akismet for Forums, if you know of anything, let me know.

 

Related:

Should I Close the Working at Home Forum? 

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December 28th, 2006 at 11:47am | Posted by Joe | Attitude, Forums, Spam, Work at Home | 4 reader remarks | Print This Post