UK Piano Page Piano Forum

I'm not sure that this is the best venue for airing a concern about the forum, dave. This complaint has been made a couple of times so I'm going to address it...

dave brum wrote:I think that the sheer amount of ungenuine and salacious postings on this page from people who have absolutely nothing to do with pianos and/or music is yet another argument for putting these pages back to how it was last year. The fact that myself and other users are reporting such postings almost daily, sometimes twice daily indicates to me that policing the UK Piano Page was certainly not a problem (for users and moderators alike) in the olden days.

The format of the forum can do nothing about the nature of people. You know yourself that spamming started just around Christmas time and eased off somewhat with another wave coming along. People are the problem, not the forum. PhpBB2 is not an option for ensuring the security of the forum and it's members so put that thought out to pasture. We daren't go back to the old format. Prior to Christmas 2008, we weren't having many problems with spamming. Policing the forum is more efficient that before because we have more Moderators so policing isn't really the problem either.

dave brum wrote:Do we have the Moderators' assurances also that accounts of people whose wish is to abuse the UK Piano Page are promptly suspended?

I think that goes without saying - it has been happening long before this post. Note that a new username is used for each piece of spam and it is quite easy for someone to assume another name so banning usernames does not permanently solve the problem either.

A lot of the spam is coming from without UK and is posted during the early hours of the morning as a consequence. Bear in mind, all our Moderators have full-time job committments and willingly take on the moderating role on a voluntary basis. Like most forums, they don't get paid for their input to the forum and, sadly, don't get enough recognition for the great job they are doing at the forefront as well as behind the scenes.

As from around the start Feb the 3.0.4 CAPTCHA was cracked by the automated spambots as most of these are run from overseas, most of the SPAM is in the early morning I keep changing the X and Y but that now only lasts for a few hours its like the BORG they keep adapting. CAPTCHA 3.0.5 will be out soon we hope, with some new improved CAPTCHA

Fighting human spammers is more difficult than fighting robots. While bots will attempt to register and post on every section possible, human spammers will want to make sure that their spam is actually being seen so they tend to be more selective and the only thing you can do with them is delete and ban. globe moderators have the power to ban users

We can't go back to the old forum security problems any anyone still running the old one is at risk

robots also consume large amounts of computer resources trying to get in so make the site slower that it should be


Barrie,

Search Engine Ranking is the name of the game. The more back links you have the further you go up in the Search Engine and even more so if the page that links to you has a high PR

the index page of this forum has a PR5 (it was 6 in December) some of the pages that have been there a wile have a Pr 4 and 3 so the Spammers look at it like this if they can get a post on a forum and it stays there, the links in that post will pick any PR that page gets, The problem is it take too long to put to hundreds of forums, so they use robots which don't care what they post The smart ones look for forums with a high PR try to join in and put a link in the sig and just post "well put " or some rubbish like that

Goggle is not giving as much weight to links in forums as it use to so you need lot of post to count

Take the UK piano page
Google show that we have 323 back links but in Google web master tools the real number is 5,000 but goggle only counts 323
Yahoo show us as having 16540
MsN 1000
Astvista 9,000
Allthe web 13400

if Goolge stopped counting back links from forums 90% of spam would stop

but it is annoying having to delete rubbish each day

Barrie,