Spam posts

[Tom Humphrey]

To make this message board as useful and easy to use as possible for herbaria@home volunteers, 'guest posting' (posting by unregistered users) is allowed and encouraged. The drawback to this policy is a certain amount of abusive posting from spammers. This type of posting is usually carried out by 'robots' - computer programs which search the internet for forums and online-guest books and make automatic postings to them. Sometimes spammers visit in person to reconnoitre fora before making spam attacks.

This diatribe is aimed at those spammers:


Reasons not to spam this message board

• It is illegal, pointless, abusive and insulting to the many legitimate users of this message board.
  
• All links posted here are tagged with 'nofollow', which means that all the major search engines will ignore your link-spam.
  
• Your message probably will not even appear, - automated filters currently block almost all the spam posting to this message board.
  
• Action will be taken against you. There are automated processes in place which instantly file abuse reports, i.e. if you post links to abusive pages on many of the major hosting providers then not only will your message not appear but an abuse report will be filed automatically within a few milliseconds of your post.
  For those sites which the automated system does not catch, abuse reports will be sent to the webmasters involved, to hosting or DNS providers or to InterNIC.
  
  Abuse reports filed about herbaria@home spam have resulted in the removal of many spam-linked pages and in the de-registration of several domain names.