PaulStoffregen
Well-known member
A few days ago, we had an incident where a spammer sent many private messages to random people, but made no public posts on the forum.
Please report any PM spam. The reports really do help. We banned that spammer's account within a couple hours of the reports appearing.
So far we've only had a few of these incidents. Each time, simply banning the offending account stopped the spew of spam. But I'm concerned the forum's private message system gives spammers a ripe-for-abuse communication channel. We don't monitor PMs. Since each message is seen by at most 1 person, the process to report spam and for us to shut the spammer down is much slower than on the public forum.
Long term, I don't see any good solutions. Changing the forum's programming is not an option. The only viable long-term solution, if spammers exploit PM-only communication, might be to completely shut down the PM system.
Please report any PM spam. The reports really do help. We banned that spammer's account within a couple hours of the reports appearing.
So far we've only had a few of these incidents. Each time, simply banning the offending account stopped the spew of spam. But I'm concerned the forum's private message system gives spammers a ripe-for-abuse communication channel. We don't monitor PMs. Since each message is seen by at most 1 person, the process to report spam and for us to shut the spammer down is much slower than on the public forum.
Long term, I don't see any good solutions. Changing the forum's programming is not an option. The only viable long-term solution, if spammers exploit PM-only communication, might be to completely shut down the PM system.