Spam robots hit W2 online community

UPDATE AS OF MARCH 26 due to heavy spamming by new members. Folks need
to be approved by W2 before they can join. One quick n easy step.
--------------------------------------

You may have been hit up by one of our members luring you to check out some spam... yes you know the kind. Our community managers do a great job managing our community and deleting profiles of potential spammers and fake profiles. Lately it has been getting pretty intense.

We have always maintained an "open community" policy as our group deals with the digital divide and our philosophy has always been to maintain as few barriers of entry to folks not familiar with inline communities. The last thing you need when you are living in the inner-city and learning about online communities is to feel like your application to join is somehow not going to be approved so you dont bother - we've been open - and we've been susceptible. We are reviewing our "approving new members" policy and we're urging ning to work harder at killing spammers. Their correspondence is included below.

thanks for your patience,
Irwin

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: The Ning Team <helpcenter@ning.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 8:27 PM
Subject: Our site has been under heavier and heavier assault by spamm... ref:00D8cCLt.50049qiow:ref

Hi Irwin,

We’re very sorry you’re having to deal with these spammers! Currently,
Ning is working hard to prevent and control spam attacks in a number of
different ways, including a new back-end service to detect and block
spam attacks (http://blog.ning.com/2010/02/stopping-spammers-before-they-can-star...) as well as tightening the rules around posting frequency. Additionally,
we recently began disabling profiles of users who have been banned as
spammers on multiple Ning Networks, and we have plans for the near
future to begin “soft blocking” (temporary blocks) users who are
posting at high frequencies and appear to be spammers. We are also
working on a feature to allow members to flag content as spam.

In the meantime, aside from keeping member moderation turned on and
approving new members before they join, please use the “Suspend for
Spam” option when you suspend spammers. This removes their posted
content and also reports these spammers to us, which helps us work on
behind the scene measures to prevent spam. Also, if you can send us a
list of the email addresses of the spammers you've seen on http://www.creativetechnology.org, we can investigate and make sure that they're all disabled.

We're working to stop these spammers and we appreciate you reporting
this to us. Please let us know if we can help you with anything else!

Thanks,
The Ning Team

ref:00D8cCLt.50049qiow:ref

Tags: computers, digital, divide, membership, policy, robots, spam, w2

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Comment by Lily R. on March 26, 2010 at 5:17am: lol (this is not a spam btw folks don't ban me;) )

Comment by Irwin Oostindie on March 25, 2010 at 12:11pm: Yes, the past week we've been hit by about 100 spammer accounts - our worst week yet. We have now changed the privacy settings so that folks need to be approved before they can join. A little tighter. Thanks for the feedback everyone.

Comment by Dean Buscher on March 25, 2010 at 10:43am: bots dont have much of anything interesting to say either..... has any one ever seen one?( rhetorical....)

Comment by kk+ on March 25, 2010 at 10:38am: yeah it's getting pretty bad and risks ruining this site and online community. time to figure out a solution!

Comment by Dean Buscher on March 25, 2010 at 9:15am: Jill you are spamming by accident I think.....

Comment by Lily R. on March 25, 2010 at 8:20am: Same here, I received an invite from a dating site from this Koya Konan, e-mail is koya200@hotmail.com
if you can suspend him for spamming, much appreciated (or her lol )