Isn't it time for a purge?

I am with you! This is the type of garbage that slow down the site, take usernames and leave a bad taste in many people’s mouths about this site.

I will gladly donate some time to getting rid of this nonsense!

Sign me up!

-bob

-- Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all. - Thomas Carlyle http://www.ffrf.org

i’ve sent notices to martin when i find these spammers
usually late at night

but it is a drawn out process
as i have to go thru the new members
then go to another tab
and find martins homepage
then send him a message
with the link to said spammer

i have sent up to 20 some nights

a flag button would sure help
it won’t delete them
but bring them to someones attention
that can decide what to do
and has the ability to remove them
if that is necessary

i remember martin doing a blog about a year ago
that they have up to 1,000 a day
that try to enter here
and his program catches most but not all
letting many slip through

they for the most part are easy to find in new member page
they are the ones that have a ‘fit’ model looking type
doing excersize or wearing makeup or fancy clothes

what i found is most have ‘new york’ as their home place

i assume most are like phone scammers
where they have a computer that does the actual linking
while it raoms around dropping links wherever it can

and never follows up
just waits for someone to contact them

while the owners party on
waiting for that connection

a flag would sure help

-- david - only thru kindness can this world be whole . If we don't succeed we run the risk of failure. Dan Quayle

KnicKnack,
If this means that about half of our membership is made up of spammers, don’t hold your breath that something will be done about it. Just like any other business, numbers are important to give a different impression. Remember the mortgage fiasco?, similar animal.
I find increasingly in this digital world that fraudulent claims have increased and have in fact voided the notion that the Internet is a source of believable information. The Information Highway has branched off to a unpaved dirt track road.

Have a great holiday – going anywhere?

-- Roger-R, Republic of Texas. "Always look on the Bright Side of Life" - An eyeball to eyeball confrontation with a blind person is as complete waste of Time.

If this means that about half of our membership is made up of spammers, don’t hold your breath that something will be done about it. Just like any other business, numbers are important to give a different impression.

I rarely hold my breath these days, thankfully. I agree that numbers are important. But I personally also think it’s important to “keep your shop clean and tidy” (I believe it, but I don’t do it) – an advertiser checking the site might easily come to the conclusion that the admins of the site don’t care, which I’m sure can’t be right.

Have a great holiday – going anywhere?

Early june is, for us, “local tourism week” – we’re heading 180km or so south to look around here – Portugal is full of unspoilt, sleepy villages where time has stood still for generations – there are still donkey carts on the roads, 50 eurocent espressos to be had (sometimes with a chocolate), and a tasty “meal for one” feeds 2 with leftovers for your dogs.

-- "Do not speak – unless it improves on silence."

I agree with eveyone. I see the new sign ups each day, and I would be willing to venture that at least 40% of them are spammers. I have sent memos to Martin and Debbie too, but like you have said it must be the numbers that nothing is done. I am on a number of other websites, custom trucks, fishing, etc, and no other site I am on has this problem. I think it would be very easy to control it electronically….obviously others have done it. It doesnt look good on the new sign up jock page with all the trash there.

-- Wayne - Plymouth MN

I think it would be very easy to control it electronically….obviously others have done it. It doesnt look good on the new sign up jock page with all the trash there.

I agree with you Snowy but I’m afraid we are victims of the numbers game as some others have pointed out.
I’ve watched the “members” grow by a couple of thousand in two months and I have to ask myself “just how many” of these are true woodworkers. From the amount of projects posted I would have to think not many.

-- Don't rollerskate in a buffalo herd

the numbers game

OK. I’m ignorant on this (oh, and I have adverts blocked), but does anyone know exactly how that works?
I presume the adverts come from some sort of “pool” of adverts, somehow targeted depending on your browsing habits.
So…

• Do advertisers pay LumberJocks every time they put up an advert? If so, the spammers aren’t browsing the site, so they’re not helping revenue there.
• I’m fairly sure when we, genuine jocks, click on an advert because it was of interest, LJ gets some money (“click-through” it might be called but I’m not sure). The spammers aren’t clicking on these adverts, so they’re not helping revenue there.

The only way I can see that the “sheer quantity” of members helps revenue, is if advertisers are paying more for click-throughs because of a larger “target audience”. That just doesn’t sound right to me.

Perhaps someone who knows exactly how all that works could explain the truth of why “more people is better, regardless of quality”.

-- "Do not speak – unless it improves on silence."

watch out that someone doesn’t get your goat!

-- My mother named me Hamilton, I have been trying to earn my nickname ever since.

Playing the devil’s advocate, why is this an issue? Until these spammers do something to mess up the site, does their presence really matter?

-- Adversity doesn't build character...................it reveals it.

on a side note – advertisers do not care at all how many members a site has – they care how many visitors, members or not. So if these spam members never revisit the site (and stay awhile browsing around) they are not helping the finances of LJ at all.

I was an admin on another site and it is a lot of work to keep these guys out. There are checks you can put in the sign up process, but they tend to find their way around them. You can make them enter a captcha, but that irritates a lot of people (including me). You can wait for a response from an email but that can be automated. it is hard to find a fool-proof solution that does not drive off a lot of legitimate potential memebers.

And truthfully, if they do not post spam in the forums or on projects, why does it really matter?

-- Kay - Just a girl who loves wood.

Ditto on trashing the spammers.

-- Roger M, Aiken, SC

I was an admin on another site and we made everyone enter kamchatka . That took care of most of the spammers ,............. but some did escape .

“What harm does this do?” was asked by a couple of LJ’ers above…...

Just click on the “Most recent” button in the “Jocks” tab on the main page and see for yourself just how many “users” are coming from these garbage spambots! They are increasing the traffic (ie: slowing things down), taking up usernames at a fast rate and generally making it more difficult for everyone to navigate this site.

How do we make it stop???? I doubt someone wants to manually filter out every one of these as they would be doing nothing but this task.

I would GLADLY vote for a kamchatka/captha like filter for new users. It’s only a one-time event and then you are in. As a matter of fact, I would force all of our users to verify their existence at regular intervals (six months maybe) to weed out anyone who is no longer active – I don’t quite know how to preserve their contribution to the site but maybe move them into an “archive” area????

This is getting pretty bad folks!

-bob

-- Man is a tool-using Animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all. - Thomas Carlyle http://www.ffrf.org

“advertisers do not care at all how many members a site has”

I would disagree with this comment. If I am running this site, I would love to go to advertisers and tell them we have 50,000 members, with hundreds signing up weekly. Your ads will get tons of visiablility…thats why they need to have and pay for ads on my site.

The problem with spammers from my perspective, is if I am a avid woodworker and I would like to join this site, and all I see for new sign-ups are a bunch of weight loss ads, I probably would go elsewhere. When I signed up 4 years ago, there wasnt hardly a spammer on here. The site looked like it was all business when it came to woodworking….now I am not sure. I know that lots of us just talk woodworking, but if you run the numbers on those that post regularly and participate outside of spamming, the numbers are a lot lower (probably half or less) of what we post for membership.

-- Wayne - Plymouth MN

we made everyone enter kamchatka. That took care of most of the spammers

What is that?

-- Have Fun! Joe Lyddon - Alta Loma, CA USA - Home: http://www.WoodworkStuff.net ... My Small Gallery: http://www.ncwoodworker.net/pp/showgallery.php?ppuser=1389&cat=500"