*cough cough* Options

[Shirotatsu]

Where the heck are all these random inappropriate posters coming from? There seems to be a recent surge of these things...

[Dr. Casey]

Not sure. Bots work in mysterious ways, and from what I can tell they've been more active in 2006 than any other year before.

[Shiidou Hikaru]

Spamvertising is as old as the hills, but only recently have bot scripts been written that can do it in an automated fashion. Normally a bot attack would post many more topics and messages (hundreds) than we've seen here, so the ones we've been getting could be human spammers. Another reason I have to believe that this is the case is that there is much more of this activity on the weekends. There is a very simple explanation for all of it of course - money. These spammers are being paid to do it, and I would suggest that anyone that sees spam links here not follow any of them. These reason for not doing that is because then their server will not get a record of a site referral from here.

As has been the policy, the spammer person has been banned.

[Shiidou Hikaru]

Security really is a difficult thing to define and implement. Personally I do not like it at all and would preferably not keep any security measures in place. Being open and cooperative worked great for the Chinese for thousands of years, however openness obviously leaves us open to being abused by those that do not share our higher ideals. Going the other way, total privacy keeps out anyone that we decide should not belong. That would make us a "secret society" that is invisible to the outside world and completely enclosed around us. While that might keep out troublemakers like spammers it also keeps out newcomers that may genuinely desire to become part of our community. Thus we would be deprived of any enrichment that they might bring with them. So the difficulty lies in what degree do we provide protection for ourselves, but also remain open to the possibilities of new friendships.

One thing that I've always done is require account registration to be able to post. This isn't really a restriction, but what it gives me is a way to have some accountability of the members. For a long time this was the only security measure in place here, until this past summer when spambots started to show up. After that two more measures were enabled - the security image and e-mail validation. Further measures could be taken, but I really do not want to resort to that since I think it would make us seem like an unwelcoming forum.