What to do if you see a spam message on EBTF

[Crazy Bob]

I reported this message a couple of days ago. It's an off-topic English language message in the Greek forum, by a user with a name that has a "machine generated" sound to it.

ευχαριστώ

[Crazy Bob]

Looks like some older spam accounts (which were never banned / removed even though their profiles are full of feedback regarding spamming) have become active again, as evidenced by spam messages all over the forum...

[joergb30]

Please remove this new account:
memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=20450

[joergb30]

Linkspam:
memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=20692

[joergb30]

next one
Our newest member hejwkdjfme

[joergb30]

I noticed another xxx spam in the flood of ~600 spam profiles registered new since December.

[joergb30]

Link spam (see profiles):

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=44693

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=46000

[joergb30]

and again Link spam:
memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=53252

[joergb30]

Link spam in profiles:
memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=54637
memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=54018

[Crazy Bob]

Please don't worry about spam links in user profiles; these profiles may only be viewed if you're logged in, so these links do not "boost" any google rating for the links spammed. Just don't click them, but I think that's only common sense

[avij]

Notice to forum moderators:

Whenever someone spams the forum, we'd like to ban the IP address (or address block, depending on location) and delete the user. The problem is, there is no way to figure out what the IP address was after the message has been disapproved. Disapproved messages get logged, but those log entries do not contain information about the IP address or even the username. If we somehow figured out the spammer's username from other sources, that doesn't help with the IP address problem. The IP address from which the user registered can be seen from the control panel, but that is often not the same as the IP address where the actual spam messages come from.

So, when disapproving the message, it'd be neat if you could write the username and the IP address of the spammer in the "further information" field on the disapproval page, like "spam from 198.51.100.42, joespammer" or "spam from 2001:db8::42, AnotherSpammer". This way the offending IP address and the username would show up in the logs and forum admins could then ban the appropriate IP addresses and delete the spammer user accounts. Thanks

N.B. If you're travelling in China, Russia or Ukraine, don't rely on being able to access the forum while on the road. Large netblocks from those countries have been blocked from the forum due to spam.