Forums are now read-only for guests (due to spam)

Once again, an another example of greedy people making the Internet a less pleasant place thanks to their lack of respect for others and their overwhelming desire to make money by any means possible.

I try to visit the forums at least once a day to answer questions or respond to comments. Over the last few months I've occasionally had to delete spam comments from the forums. These are comments posted by unregistered "users" (either real people doing this spamming for a commission, or automated bots) which contain no information relevant to the topic; only random words and sentences, advertisements, and links back to the site which is paying for the spam.

Today I came in and saw that a single thread had been utterly bombarded by spammers, all coming from different IP addresses, and had been filled up with over a dozen garbage spam posts.

So I've changed the forum settings and now only registered users can post. This will at least stop the automated bots from spamming the forums, and in the case of real people doing the spam, they will at least need to provide a valid email address to become registered users. If they spam, they'll be banned, and then have to go through the hassle of re-registering with a new address.

The down side is that legitimate, honest users will no longer be able to make posts to the forum without registering beforehand. This is sad because these honest people are penalized thanks to the greed and unethical conduct of others. I licensed the UBB.threads software (which is not cheap) and pay for the hardware and ongoing hosting costs because I want to provide another avenue of support for my current (or potential) customers, and what happens? A bunch of low-lifes comes along and degrades everything for everybody else, just so they can line their pockets.

I've been forced to take this step because I want the quality of information in the forums to remain high, and I don't have the time to patrol the forums deleting spam. I also refuse to allow these dishonest people to make use of the infrastructure that I have put in place to help my customers for their own profiteering.

The other alternative is if a number of people wanted to volunteer as moderators, then posting privileges for guests could be turned back on. The moderators would need to drop into the forums on a regular basis and delete any spam that turns up. I wouldn't expect (or want) these moderators to do any other kind of moderation; I'd just want them to tackle the spam problem.

Needless to say, anyone who wants to volunteer to become a moderator would need to be someone I can trust, and for the purposes of this forum I guess that means they'd need to have a strong record of posts.

I suspect, however, that given the relatively small number of people using the forums that there won't be too many people who will want or be able to volunteer for the moderation. Nevertheless, if you are interested you can reply to this topic and we'll talk about it.

One last comment that I want to make about forum registrations: I am very sorry that honest users now have to go through the additional step of registering in order to participate in the forums. Of course, they can still read the forums without registering, but they can't make posts. But unlike the spammers, for me ethical conduct is important. You can rest assured that if you do create an account on these forums, your email address or personal details won't be sold or given to a third-party marketing company. This should go without saying, but in this day and age sometimes these things need to be said. If you're interested in knowing more about the Wincent privacy policy, see the full statement here:

https://wincent.dev/a/about/privacy/