Dane, et al:

I've noticed a run of what I call "pseudo-spam" posts. Posts that are added to old threads with content that seems only closely relevant to the topic but with no real input. The one constant is the obligatory link in the post the sends the reader to some website pitching their wares.

A majority of the users have recently registered with only one or two posts to their credit and they are always more of the pseudo-spam posts.

I'm not sure what the webmaster can do to prevent but I wanted to just bring it up in case you have not noticed. If you want some volunteers to help moderate, I think there are some folks that would be willing to help

Sacto Diane

Hi Diane!
I'm on it but unfortunately they do most their "work" at night while I'm trying to catch some sleep. I've banned them but they just make another account and have at it some more. The cabinet and the barstool people really are making a full time job for themselves out of it!
We've also tried putting more security on the account privileges, but that just really annoys people that are legitimate.
It would be WONDERFUL if some of you are willing to help out a bit! I'll run that by Dane.
Antje

On another board I admin, we fought with similar issues. Banning users, blacklisting email domains, adding a captcha for registration - you name it, we tried it. Upgrading to phpBB 3.x seems to have done the trick for us.

If you have a geek who can handle the upgrade, I highly recommend it.

It's going to be an on-going cat mouse game. Reading more it seems that the end game is not to push traffic to the site(s) linked from the posts but to have the URLs in the posts picked up by the search engine BOTs that crawl the boards for info. The more posts with your URL in them, the higher your site is in the search engine rankings

Poking around, one tool that I came across (http://www.xrumer.co/) boasts more than 4 million active BBS links and the ability to bypass a lot of technologies to limit un-authorized posts. I've watched videos of spam software and with the right software, you generate thousands of posts in a matter of minutes. I'm not a BBS admin but work in IT so it's always a good idea to keep your software up to date as it will eliminate a lot (but not all) of the problems.

Diane

This thread is going to be nice. Just subscribing on it.