Spammers

[Volga70]

Hi all,

This forum has seen a strong increase lately in posts that are completely not related to hydrofoils. Those messages are considered to be 'spam'. Any users that are found posting these messages will have their accounts deleted, including all their posts.

It's difficult to prevent this kind of spamming. The so called 'spambots' can be kept outside of the forum through the use of captcha's, but it seems the forum is now invaded by actual 'spam-people', mainly from China and Russia, and it is a lot harder to prevent them from posting their garbage. So we will be checking every day for these spammers to delete their junk ASAP.

So if you see those unrelated posts - please ignore.

Thanks,

The admins

[Georg Weinstabl]

4 spammers with various spam messages cleaned today!

[Volga70]

Good work Georg!

I forgot to mention that there are also members in the members list who have no posts, and DO have a link to their (unrelated) website. These people are only trying to sneak their way into a higher google/bing/yahoo/whatever ranking, so they too will be terminated.

I am sorry that we have to do this, and probably this is a battle that can't be won, but we will not tolerate anymore abuse of our forum. So to sum it up:

• 1. Anyone may become a member of this forum
  
  2. However, your posts must be related to the subject of this website, i.e. hydrofoils, or be a reply to an existing post/discussion that is related to the subject of this website.
  
  3. Members are allowed to be 'silent members' (without posting messages). But 'silent members' are not allowed to have a link to their website if that website is not related to the subject of this website, i.e. hydrofoils. In other words: you may have a link to your (unrelated) website, as long as you also contribute to the discussions.

And for the rest: please enjoy this forum and exchange information with other hydrofoil enthusiasts!

[Georg Weinstabl]

Cleared today again one selling viaggra ...
I sometimes open messages that I can not understand or in a different language. If there is a link I open it. If it is a link to an advertisement, i have terminated it.

I will terminate any spammer.

It is riddiculous, that our small boat site is being attacked everyday by greedy spammers. It must be already somekind of sports for them I suppose.

[Volga70]

The day after my initial post about this spam issue I had to clear 20 accounts with a combined total of around 100 spam messages. Seems they took our complaint as an invitation to increase the amount of junk. So I changed the registration procedure: users will now have to confirm their application (and email address) before they can post. However, this still did not prove sufficient, for today we had to clean another 10 accounts and lot's of junk messages. Perhaps we should make the registration procedure even more strict, where new members will only be accepted after after explicit approval of one the admins? I don't know what else to do... currently I check the forum a few times every day to clean, but that is becoming ridiculous. Guess we will have to tighten security to keep the forum interesting for those who DO come here for Volga's and other hydrofoils. I just hope it will not pose a barrier to new, bona-fide members.

Happy flying!

ps. Georg: translate.google.com can help to determine whether a message is spam or on-topic

[Georg Weinstabl]

Hi,

I do not need to go thru google translations to see whether something is junk, spam or not ... it is obvious...

Cleaned 3 more spammer messages and deleted their Spammer accounts. Interesting to see that the spams have a certain circle:

Chinese for 3 months,
later Russians and Europeans for 3 months,
now Caribian and Americans ...
what is next? Australian and Antarctica or again 3 months china?

Hey! We had no indians up to now.... Indians awake!! there is a small fxxxing site of boatlovers to spam!!!!

[Volga70]

Well, it looks like the spam problem has been solved! All we had to do is ask a question during registration that any Volga lover would (should) know, and *poof*, gone are the spammers!

I just hope that we are not scaring the genuinely interested people away from joining the forum. That's why I want to ask all of you to please translate the following question into your own language, so I can add it to the registration form:

"Who is the main designer of the Volga type hydrofoils?"

You can mail your translations to info@volga-hydrofoil.net

Cheers,
Maurits

[Georg Weinstabl]

Hi,

I guess that this is not a bad idea, because this would mean, that anybody interested can read in our Forum and also watch videos, but if he should want to make a post he has to register. Obviously someone who reads about history or so would find out easy, who is the designer of the boat. However to keep still things easy you should limit it on the surname rather than the full name.

Best regards,

[Volga70]

Hey Georg,

It is possible to allow more than one answer to be correct, so I added a lot of possible versions of the name, both in latin and cyrillic. That should do the trick.

Cheers,
Maurits

[Georg Weinstabl]

Deleted today one spammer (goldenreg, reg@mydomen.eu) who invaded site with pornographic site links.

[Volga70]

Apparently a security hole in the forum software was found by the spammers community, because since November 16 2012 we suddenly received a tsunami of new registrations, and with that a huge wave of spam messages. I had no time to update the forum software until today, so for a while it was impossible to register or even to log in for posting new messages. My apologies for that!

All systems are go now, so let's see for how long we can keep our board spam-free. Best holiday wishes to all!

Cheers,
Maurits

[RGH]

Hi Maurits.

I am the former owner of yours volga.I was in Holland, but lost contact with you.

Yiu happy with it or not this boat?
I want to have contact with you
if you do not against please my email.
roland.grudzinskas@gmail.com
dest regard

Roland