Spammers on the Berm - how,why, and your privacy.

Rather than take down a recent comment about scamming on The Berm, I thought it would be more useful to provide a quick rundown of why we get spammers, what they do, why your privacy is safe and what The Berm can do about it.

Like anyone, spammers are able to become members of The Berm by going through the joining up process.  When they've joined up, they use software to automatically post comments on other members' 'My Page' along the lines of give us some money, or they want to marry you.  To be honest, for most people the scam will be pretty obvious.

What happens next is, as when you get any comment on your 'My Page',  The Berm sends an email to your login email address to tell you there is a message waiting for you at The Berm.  SPAMMERS CANNOT EMAIL YOU DIRECTLY, AND YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS IS NOT PUBLIC OR ACCESSABLE TO ANYONE EXCEPT ADMINISTRATORS WITH RIGHTS (CURRENTLY = ME). 

Like anyone, spammers are able to become members of The Berm if they want to try hard enough.  Ning (the provider of The Berm's platform) is very good at identifying and weeding spammers out at the stage they provide their email address on the joining page, and The Berm's database of email addresses to reject gets bigger each time someone get through.  If they get this far, we have a reasonably useful defence built into the joining process with a Capcha function and a question designed to require a bit of research to answer if you're not an Aussie, the idea being spammers normally want quick wins and will move on if it's deemed too hard to join up.

For this reason we're now only getting one spammer coming through every couple of months or so.

Once they get through, we have a few people with basic admin rights who keep an eye on new joining members and will remove anyone that looks like a spammer (and all of their content) as soon as we see one.

Unfortunately because we all need sleep, we cannot monitor the site 24 hours a day, so occasionally someone will get through.  That's life, but I bet you get more scammers on your mobile phone or direct to your home email than we do at The Berm.

OK how can we reduce spammers joining to zero?  Well if you'd like to volunteer to cover the midnight to 7am monitoring shift, please shout out.

We could make it so that an administrator has to approve any new members before they get in.  If you would like to apply for this position, please comment below.  You have to be available to access your email inbox and respond to joining requests within a short period of time, 24/7 (or share with others to do so).  I've shied away from this because I want to increase The Berm's membership.  Personally if I want to join a forum it's because I have seen a discussion I'd like to join too.  I don't want to potentially wait until the next day to be approved, which would happen here sometimes - I can't access my personal emails at work, admins go on holiday, their computer breaks or whatever.  At the moment we're not that well organised.

If you've got any thoughts or comments on this please post them here or send me a message.  I see spamming as something that any forum will experience and I think we deal with it much better than most.  I hope this post helps to dispel some of the assumptions you may have had about your email privacy.

Now get out and ride!