Thanks for the info Charlie.
It's too bad that such spammers cannot be more permanently blocked from posting generally but I guess that would be "anti-constitutional" and interfere with their "free speech", even though they annoy everyone with their annoying bandwidth wasting practice.
- Patrick
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I get what you mean but that's not the issue with spammers -- at least not for US-based sites. I'm not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination so take the following summary of current thinking with a grain of salt so to speak.
The first amendment to the US constitution says that
Congress cannot make laws abridging someone's freedom of speech (except for some rather narrow exceptions). Similar rules are in place at the state and local levels to one degree or another. That same prohibition has not been applied to individual citizens who have some control over what they see/hear in the private property of their own homes. Similar thinking seems to be the basis for social media sites, YouTube, etc. having the same right. They are essentially private entities and therefore can set their own rules. The analogy I would draw is that if you invite me into your home and I begin trashing anything/everything even remotely associated with BC, you have every right to insist that I leave.
IMHO this is becoming something of a gray area. Many of these sites are, in effect, behaving as a sort of electronic "public square" and their practices for deciding who does/doesn't get to speak are coming under increased scrutiny.
Spam forum posts are difficult for ad-blocking software to deal with because they so closely resemble regular forum posts that members want/need to see. The forum software has some tools to attempt to address this issue automatically but with differing degrees of success because the spammers are always changing tactics.
Until Charlie, Nick, or someone else on the admin team becomes a true cyborg that can monitor the forum 24/7, some spam will get through for brief periods of time until we can manually delete the posts.