Moderators! Please do something against this SPAM bot!
 

Some machine has hijacked the Europe forum on Fodor's.

Hundreds of new posts emerged this morning in Europe, when the moderators in America were still asleep. Not that I resent you your sleep, but PLEASE do something against these posts! No Fodorite would mind if a Captcha is needed to start a new thread.

Agreed - this board is useless with all the spam and volumes are slow enough as it is!

if the moderators give me a zap button...

Yes please, do something. This forum has been prone to spam attacks for quite a while already, but it has never been as bad as today.

actually all they needs to do it put a captcha (from google) on the new fodorites page and that would stop it dead.

There is already a captcha to REGISTER new name but not to START a new thread. You notice that they create several names probably manually then use bot to recycle the same names heavily to promote their casino site.

A Casino site? I have never opened one of them to see what it is about. Almost wish I knew what casino it was so I could avoid it like the plague.

ah, well a captcha on new threads would be easy for humans to manage.

Or some software that recognizes heavy posting.
This site seems a little bit outdated ... No edit function no pics no etc.

Bah. I post too much anyway. So I'll stay away for awhile.

What a mess!

Mess is the understatement of the century!

And why Korean ? It is a bit better now though. Once time, out of 50 threads, 48 - 49 are these funny Korean writing spams !

I noticed none of the complainers are offering to pay the IT expense to try and fix the issue. Perhaps, if Fodor's is your only source of entertainment, this might be an annoyance. For those of us who don't use the board to entertain ourselves, we barely notice the issue. By the time we notice, the threads are gone.

Since I know what each phone call to an IT rep costs, I don't blame anyone at RH for a delay. The hourly rates in NYC are insane.

Ooops. Maybe I spoke too soon. I see the board is strangled at this moment. I guess it's time to cough up some money.

How about you can't write a subject in Korean?

I do wonder why these guys have glommed onto Fodors in particular, but suspect it might have something to do with the lax computer security that allows this kind of posting to happen. You just don't see it on other message boards this much and I don't think it's because other moderators just zap it quickly, I suspect it is proactive.

Captcha itself is free, letting it weed out the idiots will be cheaper than a human doing it.

Sometimes I have to laugh at myself over my seeming addiction to these forums, especially when I bump up against these interruptions to all the holding forth we love to engage in. But it's usually in the evening when the moderators are likely otherwise engaged and when there really are better things I could be doing, too.

I assume they do what they can and if we're so crazed by giving the forums a rest for a few hours, maybe a therapy is a better place for our ire than here.

I guess RH no longer owns Fodor's. Been traveling too much to notice. Guess that explains the heavy hand in moderation. Not sure what to say about the new owner, Internet Brands. Except to say the name is utterly generic and that this problem is probably their server problem to fix.

Now that RH no longer owns Fodor's, it'll be interesting to see if the board's personality will change. New ownership of anything always invites tinkering. And, goodness knows, there are a few personality disorders that need fixing.

When Frommer's was acquired from Wiley by an online entity we've all heard of, Google, it was such a disaster for the brand that Arthur & daughter Pauline bought it back 8 months later. Before returning the site to it's founder, Google erased all the forum content. Like here, years of solid detailed information archived for future travelers. Gone. They've never recovered as far as I can see.

I hope a similar fate isn't waiting down the road for Fodor's.

It's easy to skip/scroll through these particular posts, and I think they disappear quickly enough. The ones in English with misleading titles or ones meant only to advertise are another story. Those have to be opened and read before you can hit the triangle.

This morning I found over 200 Korean spams for a Cambodian internet casino, if I can trust Google translate. I did not click.

As long as the new regime doesn't pull a Chowhound destruction, we'll eventually be OK. I just wish it was sooner rather than later.

What's a Chowhound destruction?

There are plenty of people on here who could be trusted with a zap button.. as mentioned earlier. If they abused it.. take it away. If not.. lots of free help

Chow hound was a nice forum.
Now utterly boring after some changes.

Boring and unreadable

Moderators are probably ok.
They delete me when I say Snob is as bad as the Italian machos she says she dominates

Hits are hits with the new company. Post are down so this makes it look like they have more posters and readers. Read the board reader, the spam guys are taking over as the top posters. The complaint was deleted yesterday so expect this one to be also.
Poor Frommers, Pauline replies to every question.

Woinparis, is this why you come back as someone new? I really like TA more and Rick Steves is not so bad. I love that he is Pro marijuana now and campaigning hard for it this election. Go Rick!

Oh no, 8:45 and they have started already tonight.

It's easy enough to eliminate any threads that aren't in english for one thing.

And while I know nothing about maintaining a web site the advertising here pays enough that they can make small updates to this century in order to avoid scaring away even more posters.

The US board is basically moribund - 1/3 of what it used to be and europe is headed the same way.

And here we go again... Sigh.

...
Not Macross I change names because I post too much and don't want to leave too many personal comments for everybody to read. People following daily will know me, people who don't will have access to part of my life - Guess it is called paranoia.
:-)

And normally I have a different name in each forum but i am woinparis in RS - you are Macross there ? Didn't spot you.

Mvg.

It was bad enough with all the testosterone things on the US boards, but now the Europe board is infected. I just checked: out of the 50 most recent postings, only 5 are actual postings, the rest being unreadable spam.

Sorry, this forum has become totally unusable.

TTT

It seems the end may be near. Most people have no patience for this annoyance, and seeing now how bad it is, I don't blame them.

15 real posts out of the first 327 threads this am at this moment. And the names of the spam posters are repeating. They are not even banning the spam posting names!

Recently, one of the long time posters was automatically banned by tripping the "too many posts,too fast" trigger, which I assume turned off.

This site is becoming useless.

Can you say "Death Spiral?"

But yet they removed a post from this thread last night.

I do not understand why they are so inactive. The moderators obviously scan all regular posts for quite harmless posts which might be considered insulting, but they do nothing against the spams, albeit it were so easy.

And the problem of the European forum is that the spams appear all morning, today up to 3 p.m. (at least) before they are deleted.

The American Snob may tell us that it does not bother her because she lives in an American timezone, but for us Europeans it is extremely annoying.

Since I can't sleep, I started topping some of the threads. Not doing much good. The spam just keeps coming. Ugh!

<i><font color=#555555>"The American Snob may tell us that it does not bother her because she lives in an American timezone, but for us Europeans it is extremely annoying."</font></i>

Such a snobby comment. The only people who are truly bothered by this annoyance are the board addicts. Everyone else moves on to something more productive in life.