Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Spammers should be drawn and quartered
Posted by Jason Dunn in "UPDATE" @ 06:48 PM
It seems that about an hour ago, an enterprising spammer decided to sign up for an account with this site, then manually harvested email addresses from the membership list and sent out spam about a web hosting company. I immediately suspended him, sent him an email telling him to burn on the 7th layer of hell, and contacted the hosting company to suspend his affiliate status. What an idiot! 
Apparently we weren't quite "spam proof" enough from people who wanted to harvest manually. Our immediate action was to switch the membership list from listing an email address to having a form for email. This means that the person would have to fill out the form each time to contact you. Tomorrow we're going to modify the membership template to completely remove the email listing - the only way to contact each other will be via the private messaging feature. So technically someone could sign up and spam you via private messages, but they would have to wait a certain number of seconds between each message, and I could suspend them very quickly.
I value the privacy of all Thoughts readers, and I deeply apologize for allowing this to happen. Comments welcome. You can [email="[email protected]"]flame the idiot yourself[/email] or contact the company he was spamming for. It may be that they didn't know about his actions, but they're ultimately responsible for educating their own affiliates about not spamming.
Apparently we weren't quite "spam proof" enough from people who wanted to harvest manually. Our immediate action was to switch the membership list from listing an email address to having a form for email. This means that the person would have to fill out the form each time to contact you. Tomorrow we're going to modify the membership template to completely remove the email listing - the only way to contact each other will be via the private messaging feature. So technically someone could sign up and spam you via private messages, but they would have to wait a certain number of seconds between each message, and I could suspend them very quickly.
I value the privacy of all Thoughts readers, and I deeply apologize for allowing this to happen. Comments welcome. You can [email="[email protected]"]flame the idiot yourself[/email] or contact the company he was spamming for. It may be that they didn't know about his actions, but they're ultimately responsible for educating their own affiliates about not spamming.
