Hello everybody! I am new to the site www.moviepropforum.com
Could anyone, please, advise if there is a lot of
spam and unscrupulous advertising. Can I trust
all this information, which is present at this forum?
Sorry for stupid questions, I just really want know which
information I should trust or even pay attention.

Of Course spam gets in, its a FREE forum. No one gets paid to keep it perfect. Therefore spam gets in along with the good stuff. We do try to check it and clean it up a few times a day. Also, nothing is absolute. This is a place to share information. If you want to buy props its up to YOU to make sure if things are really what they say they are. But this IS a place where you can say "hey i am looking into buying such and such, what should i look for in it to make sure its the real thing?" and people will surely reply to that, because thats what a forum is for - sharing your knowledge. If you dont want the world to know what youre after then you can always email Mr.Movieprop himself and he will try to help you. But there are other really knowledgable prop people checking the forum too so why not just post what you really want to know about?

If you ever need any extra help with the spam then i would be glad to help out as another mod.
~William~

Moviepropattitude I appreciate the offer and I will keep it in mind.

Hi again. I love this forum and I hate seeing all the spammers cluttering it up when I check for new posts. I wish I was more tech-skilled and had some positive suggestions for you. I did look up some info on Wikipedia and there's a section on Spam prevention that might be helpful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_spam

Maybe some other more tech savvy member might have ideas for you regarding Spam filtering that don't cost an arm and a leg to add or install on the site? Anyone?

The only problem with spam filtering is collateral damage. A lot of spam comes from bots using proxy servers all over the world with multiple Ips. You can't ban them all ahead of time. You could try to stop them with email address verification which I am giving a try at now. You could also disable guest postings but then again this thread was started by a guest that didn't register so such a method would have prevented this thread from appearing. That being said one can make all posts subject to approval before becoming visible. This is what we do in the general forum but then people have to wait to see their posts and it reduces conversation in threads as one is then waiting for approval to respond to threads they find of value.
Also one could require approval on all new members rather than letting someone sign up and post immediately. That is also being used a bit now. If you look at the forum home page you see like a few thousand posts and 12,000 or so members, the reason for that is 10,000 plus fake spam members have signed up and posted even more threads which have been deleted.

Specific Ip's and email addresses of trouble spammers I am banning now. You are right more should be done to reduce spam and this is being worked on.


Any suggestions for ways to improve the forum beyond spam prevention/deletion that anyone cares to share?