I may be wrong....
 

but the spam filter needs tweaking. There were about 1,200 tonight. And not one was about whether the French were nice or not.

My understanding is that the "filter" consists of individual moderators in several time zones who delete the posts one by one.

It was sarcasm. Whatever method they are employing it is like fighting Russian hackers with a Commodore computer.

You are wrong. This has been an ongoing battle with lots of unhelpful contributions such as yours. Bottom line: You want better service on a free website, offer to pay a subscription or write effective code for nothing.

it is not done for free it is in the hope you purchase the Fodors guide books ie one giant advertisement. Ads do appear if you do not use an ad blocker too.
The tips you add to the forums no doubt help to keep the guide books up to date.

Besides which I enjoy reading about the missiles in North Korea and the president's corruption case in the south.

IMD is right.
Fodors offer shitty service and cannot cope with the situation.
Lot of good will from the mods - they are doing a great job, and one that is not rewarding.
Bottom line : FODOR's doesn't give a rat about the forum.
So sorry if my contribution is not helpful.

IMD (and a lot of others) contribute to this forum.
We are not only here for sniping. We are not here to get service. And there are a lot of other sites when we can offer our services, not the other way round.

So if the site is not capable of providing a stable platform for regulars to contribute, then yes, there is a problem.

Bottom line : Fodors is unable to provide the infrastructure for the service they say they want to offer.

This being said, I'm utterly fed-up with these spams and will let it go for today.
One day without posting !
Rejoyce all who don't like me...

You are wrong. This has been an ongoing battle with lots of unhelpful contributions such as yours. Bottom line: You want better service on a free website, offer to pay a subscription or write effective code for nothing.
________________________________________
Of course, it was my fault for complaining. It is like a husband cheating on his wife and blaming the gossips for telling everyone.

To tell you the truth, I post less and less here and it is not because of the spam, but due to the tedious self-righteous prigs like yourself.

The mods had been getting it under control, but it has been getting worse and worse again. It is just becoming unusable and is dying a slow death. Especially if you live in Europe. I have been here since 2003 and I am starting to look elsewhere.

It is particularly odd than the spammers now place over 1,000 a day. They are not getting sales. Add even if someone gets paid per placement, there must be some algorithm that attributes source of sales.

I think that Fodor's is caught in the old business conundrum. Do we spend money to attract customers (or users) or do we wait and see how many people use the site before we invest more money.

In either case, they are losing participants civil and otherwise. A slow death is ugly.

Let me know if you find an active travel board besides TA.

I think the recent few days when it was really REALLY horrible was because of a perfect storm of moderators being unavailable for one reason or another. I think (HOPE!) later this week things will return to just annoying instead of impossible . . .

The site is basically useless for 12 hours a day...most of European waking hours. It has been going on for months. I am really just about ready to quit because I find it so frustrating. Either fix the issue, or just shut the forums.

What is the goal of these spams? Just an attack on Fodor's? No one opens them so they can't be hoping to sell scams - why or why or what is their modus apperendi?

I know I need to learn another language to the 3 and a bit I have got, but Korean is not on that list.

Again what are they -Korean spam - trying to achieve? Maybe North Korea just being North Korea?

As I understand it, they are ads for an internet gambling site. Spammers like these are paid per post - doesn't matter that none of us click on their links.

What the links do is provide links to the core website, Google sends out bots to look for multiple links to the core website and as more link to it, the core website moves up the Page Ranking.

This Page Ranking (named after Mr Page amazingly) is amplified if the link site has a high Page Ranking. So more links from high Page Rankings sites gives your site a higher Page Ranking (shurly everi ful nos this? Molesworth). Fodors has a high PR score so that makes it more valuable.

So somewhere in Korea when a customer looks for a "casino online" in their google search the higher Page Ranking goes higher in the google search list.

Hence the "casino" gets more hits from your actual real punter because most people can't be bothered to turn the page to page 2.

spammers could be paid by PRanking scores.

Either way, a real pain

In terms of service and payment.

Fodors gets free advice, by our actions they appear to give free advice, the comments here are often quoted in the books, and they too get higher PR from our activities just by using the site. All by hosting a site and doing a little cleaning up.

So Fodors is a net beneficiary from our actions, that they are slow to fix the problem, suggests an accountant is running the business not an IT/web expert. Very old school and not a good sign for the future.

I thought Fodor's sold the forum to Internet Brands. So I'm not sure whether Fodor's itself gets any benefit from the forum posts.

I'm sure inserting a spam filter into the code is not that hard, as millions of websites out there have been doing it. Must be that Fodors' IT person have been on vacation for half a year, or there isn't any person to begin with.

This morning I offered again to help deleting the spam, as I work on computer all day long and I'm at european timezone. Of course they deleted my request.