General Discussion

Re the posts by izdvd http://www.izdvd.com/

This is a commercial website and I wonder why these posts have been made trying to sell dvds, I don't think Dawlish.com is a forum for promoting commercial interests and websites, making such posts on sites such as this clearly an attempt to get cheap (free) advertising, what do others think?

y did u put a link 2 da webs1te lol?

So people can see that izdvd is a commercial business not an individual, strange the person posting the izdvd ads doesn't know how to put links into their ads.

tink u mus b on comision. jk lol.

It could be a spam bot, I've heard of them doing similar things. See -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_spam

It would explain not putting the links in properly.

All those izdvd posts should be removed ..not related to Dawlish.

I think the forum should have an approve system for new member posts ..like Yahoo do.

You're probably right about the bot as, am sure most people are familiar with sites now asking you to put in a sequence of distorted numbers or letters, or the answer to a simple sum to login. The idea being that a bot can't process such info. I ran a site once that was 'infected' with a bot that inserted hyperlinks which took people to shopping sites.

Perhaps the webmaster can comment, am sure no-one would object to having such posts deleted.

I've disabled the user and deleted the posts.

I introduced a simple bot detection mechanism a while ago whereby the user has to enter the first and last letters of the chosen username in separate boxes. This is validated both on the client and the server.

I admit it is not hard to for someone writing a spambot to program this in, but as I had not seen this used before I thought it would probably be OK.

I will keep an eye on it for now.

Many thanks, indeed it is very difficult to keep on top of such stuff.