Dollan wrote:And really, how much spam has hit this place since it opened? I think we're talking about a really low ratio, here. Certainly not enough to panic over.
Dollan, you corrected on what you said about spammers registering (they haven't, folks!), but sorry to say I disagree with you about the level of spam not being a problem in the near future.
Even since last night, we have had 3 more such posts. I suspect someone did 'out of curiosity' follow the link, and that has told the purveyor of questionable mechandise that this forum is alive with readers. We could expect posts in 10's soon, 100's next month. Then it will be very difficult to find any serious Celestia post. I speak from the experiences of my less net-savvy friends who have a spam to mail ratio above 100 in their private e-mail inboxes!
I think Michael Kilderry has made the two good reasons why we would benefit from no-guest-postings:
1. The 'forgot-to-log-in'/'double cookie' problem is solved.
2. Then, you will be able to edit all your previous postings for bloopers.
For people who want to change their name from time to time, no problems there: all users have a unique join-number. Spammers can be blocked through that if they keep changing names.
Michael Kilderry wrote:I nearly clicked on the post thread but then I thought against it because the possibility of it being another spam message crossed my mind.
As I said in a separate post, following the link to download the web pages advertised will alert that web site that the spam is working. So far, just viewing the post on the Celestia forum will not alert them. Michael, you do not (yet) need to fear that viewing such a post has done harm, just don't follow their links!
However, general piece of web advice: a way that spammers can know that a (unidentified) Celestia user did view the post is if the spammer includes a link to an image within their post. They also include a track ID within the url to that image. When you view the post, your browser will request that image from the spammer's server with the track ID. The image can be a very tiny 1 by 1 pixel black square, you don't necessarily see it.
I checked the HTML source of a couple of spams and it looks like they're not doing that yet.
They could soon post explicit pictures.
I get round this problem by setting my Firefox browser so that it loads images from the same site as I browse. I can view off-page images from a web page I trust by changing the setting and reloading the page.
Spiff.
