Deleted posts/person banned

[Stef]

Hi All --

Having just made contact with Daveman & demografx (we're in different time zones and continents!), the decision was made to outright ban the recent member who posted his website and Face Book links -- which were commercial and definitely inappropriate for poiscenter.

The only way to do that was to delete the entire topic/thread, because he had started the topic. This meant deleting his posts and the posts that followed.

Big THANK YOU to Prancer and Outsider for spotting the creep and pointing him out!!

Just to let you all know -- the decision to ban a forum member is not easily made. I can vouch for it.

Best to all,
Stef

[Prancer]

Thanks Stef! I agree that banning someone should only be a last resort, but in this case he was begging for it by posting a link to his Amazon store (wtf), and showering us with spam links. Also, thanks to everyone reviewing the registration requests! It's amazing just how many fake requests there were, but I can believe it! Hopefully now the spam numbers will start declining in a big way.

I found my last message on the now-deleted spam thread from a cached version of the topic. I thought it was a good point about how they disguise themselves sometimes, so I want to place it here:

It's not always easy when they try to disguise their spam/bogus sites as helpful material, or when they meld it together with something actually useful. We've seen it at NSF; we've seen it here. The good thing is that overall there is way more legitimate dialogue than the occasional deadbeat spammer spewing out spam, or trying to profit off of the agony and desperation of other people.
Guess they're still living in some pre-2004, ignorant, lowbrow mindset where they actually think that kind of shady bahavior will go unnoticed or somehow pay off. So to them I have one word: FAIL! [which actually seems appropriate because that's probably exactly what they did back in school.]