by Windowfarms
Volunteers for the war on spam?
11:59 am in Uncategorized by Windowfarms
Dear Windowfarmers,
Can you volunteer a few hours to deleting spam user accounts?
Internet scanning robots that produce spam comments have found a way to penetrate our site. They have broken through all of the typical protections for these online communities. We have been combatting them through a variety of methods, but the spammers have top hackers working on this. Andy, an excellent programmer, is working on several means to shut down their new point of attack. However, we have a backlog of fake users who generate spam and their accounts need to be deleted in order to stop generating spam.
If you are willing to help, will you please send an email to destiny@windowfarms.org with the subject line “volunteering for the war on spam”?
Thank you!
-Britta
I am wondering if this issue could not be solved by using another system than blog posts to keep the community updated. This is completely unsuitable for this kind of project, both for clarity and to avoid spam.
WordPress is not a bad system for a webpage like yours. You can filter spam by installing and activating something like Akismet (http://akismet.com) or Mollom (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mollom/) who are both excellent at filtering spam. For deleting dummy accounts, there is this plugin: http://lyncd.com/user-spam-remover/ (I haven’t tested this one though).
Beyond that, I really like your project!!
@Erwan Thanks for your input. We have definitely heard this before. We have both experienced benefits and downsides to this site. We know that the blog post system has many drawbacks and we are in the midst of building a new platform onto which we will migrate for more structured data as well as some wiki like functionality. We have an alpha in testing with a small user group. We expect to initiate the migration in several months.
@Simon thank you for your input as well. We have akismet installed and have been using it along with several other antispam plugins for some time. Thank you so much for these new leads on plugins, particularly the deleting dummy accounts one. Exciting.