Hello Everyone!

I concur, it's pretty bad. Has to be time to change the registration process. 

I agree. This forum is a great place, friendly (unlike a lot of other car forums I've seen), useful information and 90% of the products talked about are Easy Composites. So it would be a shame to see it decline in use due to the spam.

Cutting the guys at EC some slack, I spoke to Paul about the spam and they have tried to make the forum as open and easy to access as possible to make it easy for people to get involved

THIS has obviously given problems with the bot spam that looks to be coming from the same place.

Ive spoken to a mate who runs a bike forum and he said its very difficult to completely stop the spam, relying on moderators hard work BUT said a possible stopper could be the addition of a honey trap at the registration to the forum.

I'm not a programmer so if there are any computer geeks out there maybe they have some input.

Also not ragging the guys and truly appreciate the forum, but I like to search for new posts to get an idea of what's going on. The spam really messes that up. It would be great to get rid of these muppets! Cheers and thanks

We are doing our best on this, the problem is that they're not spam 'bots'; they're real spammers who sign up (through the CAPCHA process), with real email addresses. They then log into their email and click the validation link to confirm their email. If people go to these lengths then it's pretty hard to stop spam posts and all we can do really is remove spam when we see it, ban the user, delete their posts and blacklist their IP address; all of which we do as quickly as we can.

We can change the registration process so that a moderator has to confirm the new registration request but, looking at the last registrations which went on to post spam they were from standard sounding email addresses with normal sounding names. Any moderator (myself included) would have just approved the request, just like the validation link already does. We'll keep looking into it but if it's not spam bots then it's pretty difficult.

Should we make it so that users have to send a covering letter explaining their interest in composites, along with their registration details?

Matt Statham
Easy Composites / Carbon Mods - Technical Sales

Hello Matt,

Hello All,

Yes mate,

Warren set me up so I can delete posts but I cannot remove the account.

winseller,hazelggarner and liberty_business have been very busy over the weekend and as quick as ive deleted the thead they've been back on.