GHQ!!! LOOK AT THIS!!!

[panzergator]

There are 37..., THIRTY SEVEN, spam threads on the front page of the forum this morning. You CANNOT allow this. You web service CANNOT allow this. Neither can you expect a volunteer to take care of this every day. The forum is practically UNUSABLE at this point. It is, at BEST, UNPLEASANT, to come to this forum. At WORST, young users are being exposed to this crap. There is a vulnerability in your service that SHOULD NOT BE THERE. It is driving down participation, damaging your reputation, and may be impacting your business.

GET THE DAMNED WEB SERVICE ON THIS AND FIX IT!

[Tanker Mike]

I belong to more than a couple forums and I have never seen anything remotely close to this. Please fix it.

Mike

[MechCommander]

This is gone out of control. GHQ please for the love of General Alexander Kerensky, please fix your forum.

[StarCruiser]

It's gotten to the point that there no...point in this forum at all...

There's spam in multiple threads, spam wrapping across multiple pages. It's got to stop.

My suggestion, for now, stop ALL registration of new accounts (post a notice at the top as to why) and kill ALL of the bot accounts.

[7.62]

If you log in you can see which pages everyone including our "Guests" are viewing.
I can not help but notice that a large amount of accounts are reading/replying to messages between users.

So either we have a very, very active hobby group here in the background talking between themselves or.......
This site is being used as a meeting point/communication hub.

[Beagle]

Concur with all of the above, this is one of the reasons among a few that it took me so long to start participating in this forum and sharing my angle on the hobby, and at times like this, I start wondering why I bother, or if it’s worth risking dealing with hackers and spammers.

[panzergator]

BUMP

[panzergator]

Well, Folks, I enjoy this forum, but this is going nowhere. I'm leaving the forum until it's fixed. If you need to contact me, email me. I'm not signing in, so won't see PMs. Happy to answer questions or discuss stuff, but not on the forum amongst all this spam. Chrisswim and a couple others have my email.

[panzergator]

Deleted

[whenimaginationfails]

Does anyone know what bulletin board software GHQ is using? - UPDATE: Found in the FAQ that it is phpBB.

Looks like most if not all of the new bot registrations started on May 1st, 2021. Ending auto approval might help here, as would adding a Captcha test for creating accounts. Here is how to add a Captcha to phpBB, if that is what they are using: https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3 ... a-captcha/

If GHQ is using phpBB, then they can add this free plug in (https://www.phpbbservices.com/my-software/spam-remover/) to link to the Akismet spam service (https://akismet.com/). I use Akismet for comments on my blogs and it works well with little intervention on my part. Cost is $100/year (https://akismet.com/plans/), which is likely far less than what it would cost to have a person babysit the forum.

I also suggest deputizing a few trusted members as moderators to help with the load or at least mark messages as not viewable so someone from GHQ can review them to make sure valid posts are removed.

[cabin4clw]

DO NOT understand why ghq puts up with these posts. Get rid of them, make it harder to get an account, whatever needs to be done, do it!!!!

[StarCruiser]

I've never been able to conceive of what these useless posts are even really for... No one here (no one in their right mind anyway) would even both to look at those gibberish threads, let alone click on any links in them.

No one is going to buy anything from these idiots so, why bother?

[Beagle]

GHQ, I see you’re on here deleting threads right now, the user at the bottom, aaezeja, is a spammer.

[MechCommander]

that's it GHQ keep up with the deleting, there's more spam posts below and on the next page.

[StarCruiser]

Beware that there are also a couple on the N scale forum.