Well folks, we are using a Captcha service on the forums now, this is only for anonymous posting, and don't worry, it doesn't affect your status as an anonymous poster. It is a tool to help prevent spambots & scripts from posting in the forums. If you have trouble reading the text from the graphic, press the reload button below it until you see something you recognize and type the characters into the adjacent box.


Definition of CAPTCHA from wikipedia:
A CAPTCHA (an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human.

I had incredibly bad spamming on my message board that we had no way of stopping. We could delete the linked messages from the insurance/loan company that was doing it, but found no way to get rid of the top message that they followed on from as it was hidden from sight on our own admin page.
Captcha was not available at the time, and I was annoyed to eventually take my own board down on seeing the words "Car Loans", completely filling the page one morning when I logged on.
The problem as well with mine, was being a dot com,as opposed to dot UK,with an unmoderated board, I never knew what I was logging on to, from the overseas posters. People can be very tough when typing anonymously behind a keyboard!

Indeed, spamming on forums, comment areas and guestbooks has become a bane of modern internet websites. You only really have the option of using Captcha or forcing user registration.

Moderating any board always seems to be an overbearing task, and the larger it grows the more difficult it becomes to manage.

I only hope the recent changes make the moderators lives a little easier, and aren't too much of an inconvience to the (anonymous) users...

And we all thought email spam was bad...