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This site seems a little bit outdated ...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.