I'm going to add my voice to this. I've always advised a little bit of patience but as it's happening on an even more regular basis it is surely having some impact on the visits of the members.
Nik was talking a while back of upgrading the server perhaps one of the Mods could get in touch with him. I realise he is no longer resident either here or even the UK but I noticed on one of my rare visits to CS recently that he was logged in so getting hold of him shouldn't be too difficult.
Or the other option is to sign up more mods, not singling anyone out but we have mods listed who have not visited the site for years.
I'm no computer genius but surely you can prevent the majority of the spam through the use of filters. And then anything that does slip through then just delete.
I for one welcome more mods, it would be great to share the spam deleting misery that is becoming a daily event.
Most of you guys don't see half of it because alot of the time it's caught very soon afterwards, it's just on the odd days when none of us happened to log on during the day that you guys notice how much spam gets through. I wish you could see the admin log of all the deleted spam, it's ridiculous how much of it we delete.
For instance, WU123 has been deleted (and banned my e-mail) 3 times this week, it keeps coming back with a new e-mail address.
It would be nice to have a few more mods to help out but unless the site is monitored 24/7 then there is always going to be periods where spam is sat there, with nothing being done about it, todays spam was sat there for 8 hours I noticed, which isn't alot, but seems it when the 8 hours is over the peak period when people log on, it's also annoying for users who have logged on, seen it very quickly after it's been posted, and can't do anything about it until a mod arrives.
Although I log on every day I can't always log on during the morning/afternoon due to working offshore and not having internet access, although more often than not it's too windy to go offshore in which case I spend most of the working day deleting spam on Cliotrophy.
I know Nik has mentioned about the new server but obviously funds are needed so until then it isn't going to happen.
So please just bare with us because it will be deleted asap.
The mods are doing what they can - unfortunately no matter how many mods there are it will always be a reactionary role not proactive. Banning by IP seems to not even be effective any more as they keep re registering from new IP addresses....
I would welcome one or two new mods though as it seems of the 6 we currently have only 3 are regularly on here.
Having viewed a few spammers profiles, some of them could be classed as spam bots quite easily, but others profiles just look the same as anybody elses.
So is the spam we see on a daily basis an actual human registering and pasting the spam onto the threads. Or is it a computer doing it? Is the same spam or usernames on other online boards? Surely if its a computer you can block it from registering as a member.