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Rusty, what about you and Malone sharing the title ? We went bumping mad yesterday

Oh, yes!
Malone is always to the fore when there is bumping to be done!

I have to go out now. Can't keep uo with the spam today

I think the "bumping " is more exhausting than the Spam!!

The kitchens were annoying but there were far fewer of them.

Many of these spam postings have common features in their titles. So, with a parameter input to identify any new postings which include partial copies, the spam can be automatically identified, and the posting aborted. In addition the account of the poster can be suspended. All of this, I suspect, could be achieved without any manual intervention other than input by Ash, or one of his colleagues, of the titles of spam posts.

I feel any technical ideas re tackling the spam should be discussed privately by email with the admin. team. Remember....what we read here can also be read by the spammers ! We have to keep one step ahead .

Cerasus, I don't think the spammers are so well organised or so thorough as to read every post on the site. But perhaps you're right, so I'll keep my thoughts to myself unless anyone wants to contact me.

More than likely the spammer is just an eedjit sitting in his underpants, in his bedroom. It's not as if his postings are advertising anything, mostly containing just sdfsdfsdf stuff. And the extra effort of needing to change the title of each post to something unrecognisable from the previous post might be just enough to put him off here and go looking for a softer target...

Okay, so here is the automated solution. Store every thread title for n days. Then scan subsequent thread titles for exact matching sequence of characters eg '91 9950598551'. If a repeat, prevent posting, suspend poster. Some care needs to be taken to prevent capturing repeats of title characters such as 'Times',' Jumbo', 'Listener', etc. and if necessary those could be hard coded as exceptions, to be allowed through. Wouldn't take a programmer a long time to do...

Surely a quicker solution is to simply dump any post which contains more than a certain number of characters (30 should easily be enough for most threads) or contains any characters which aren't alphanumeric (with the exception of ', ", (, ) and @).