Spurious posts

[allan horsfall]

Gentlemen,

I've got a puzzling question, how come the post on 'technical' by Urbain Faure, was first put up on Wednesday, I replied same day about it "getting ridiculous", and the following day, Thursday, it was reposted without my response.

Is someone, some where, playing with our web site???

Allan

[peterc]

Guys
The forum should be for members only not all and sundry
If we want to entice others into the club by allowing them to read the forum and see its advantages then fine but they shouldn't be allowed to post any queries or replies. They need to pay the fees and join.

Who's idea was it to make it totally open - it's obviously that before long you would get the cranks playing around with it.

[nikbj68]

Sorry to disagree, Peter, but I think the forum is all the better for being open. Ok, we need to cap this spam issue, but other than a few nuisance posts, there is much to be gained from the input of non-members, who may, like I ( eventually ) did, become members.

[kaiserbilly1]

Gents
We are working on this and hope to have a solution to this problem shortly.
Bill

[peterc]

Nick
We will need to continue to disagree
If non members can see the extent of advantages of being in the club to gain info then they will join won't they?
Anyway the forum is not the place to have disagreements that's what went wrong in 2003
Peter

[Roger King]

I'm in 5 owners clubs and none have a closed forum. The Mini Cooper Register did it for a while, everyone stopped going there and it's never really recovered. All the others are open-access and have a lot of traffic. All we need is a captcha-type key for a first post for new registrations to the forum - it's a one-off security check, once you've done it you can post ad infinitum the way you always did before.

[Paul Blore]

I'm in favour of an open forum, but on the subject of the spam posts, maybe we're using the wrong forum software. Of the forums I use, the runaway favourite forum software is vBulletin, which appears to have a built-in spam filter called Spam-O-Matic.
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=248042

Paul

[Paul Blore]

Looking into this further, there is a whole stack of free anti-spam tools available for the phpBB forum software that we currently use:
https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/modi ... ti-spam-9/

Paul

[Paul Blore]

These spurious posts appear to be random strings of text captured from elsewhere on the 'net. Many of them have come from eBay, but Wikipedia is also a common source with similar issues I've seen elsewhere.

Paul

[nikbj68]

Nick
We will need to continue to disagree
If non members can see the extent of advantages of being in the club to gain info then they will join won't they?
Anyway the forum is not the place to have disagreements that's what went wrong in 2003
Peter

Hi Peter. I have no problem with our difference of opinion, certainly not worth falling out over!
In defence of my position, I offer the 'newbie' thread as an example of a non-member adding interest & value to the forum, and hopefully very soon will become a member as a result of the welcome received.

Vive la difference!

Cheers, Nik.