forum spam, the saga continues

Hi everyone,

In the last week, the human spammers have ramped up their attack on the Squeakland forums, as evidenced by the dramatic increase in spam. For those that aren't aware, this is coming from humans that are getting paid to create accounts at websites that pay 50 cents per forum post, etc. (I won't like to them now

We are *not* selling advertisement to mobile phone companies or drug companies. This is spam, plain and simple.

I've disconnected the automatic forwarding of forum posts to the the mailing lists, which will solve the problem for the current majority of our community that uses mailing lists (at least until the human spammers discover them as well.) This doesn't solve the other problem though, which is spam on the forums, which is unfortunately because most new users and children are likely to read the forums first, not the mailing lists.

This means I need your help. Please volunteer to become a moderator on the forums, so you can help me weed out the spam there.

Yes, we'll be attempting new technical solutions, such as blocking the most troublesome human spammer websites. But as with all spam, this is a game of tug-a-war between the spammers and the rest of us. There will always be spam we do not catch automatically, which means we will always need help deleting it before someone gets the wrong idea about Squeakland.

For a history of this issue, search for "forum spam" in forum search. It had gotten better for a while, now it's worse again.

Thank you for your understanding,
Timothy