Sorry: willit, not wilt.

<Fodors, time to pull the finger out please>
This is an unacceptable vulgarity directed at the editors--and yet, MY comment deploring it is the one that's gone?

Newbie,
Only in your mind (and if you have some vulgar image please keep it to yourself), the remark is quiet normal in the UK and refers to the little dutch boy who mainted the dyke by leaving his finger in it.

Good to see the Koreans take the weekend off and only start at about 7:30 this morning which suggests they mainly work at ruining Fodors in their spare time. Lau Tsu had a comment about this.

kja - thanks, I hadn't realised it was all of them.

The owner's IT resources are otherwise occupied. The relative priority of this site is obvious. They'll fix it when they fix it.

I just looked at the Europe forum from California and saw that the entire first page was Korean spam. I didn't bother to read farther.

Seriously, folks, these posts are a PITA, but they are also easy to skip -- unlike so many ads, they are at least in Hangul! And the monitors (who, as I understand it, aren't Fodor's employees) take them away pretty quickly. In fact, I think the monitors are doing an awesome job in the face of these bot attacks, and have begun a thread to thank them:
http://www.fodors.com/community/foru...s-monitors.cfm
JMO.

About 80 spams in the first pages. Well. Sure not a biggie. And it will help me stay away for some time.
See you later all.

do you think that those deleted comments were in korean?

how do they get into the Trip reports?

annhig, they appear to have gained access to at least one Fodors account, and random Korean posts keep appearing in all sorts of threads.

>>annhig, they appear to have gained access to at least one Fodors account, and random Korean posts keep appearing in all sorts of threads.<<

No -- it did look like that one day. But it was apparently an old time Fodorite who tried to 'help' by topping a slew of threads to get them above the spam . . . and posting in Korean as a joke.

>>how do they get into the Trip reports?<<

They don't 'get into TRs'. They obviously are real people -- they take the time to tag many of the threads for both specific countries Trip Reports.

No -- it did look like that one day. But it was apparently an old time Fodorite who tried to 'help' by topping a slew of threads to get them above the spam . . . and posting in Korean as a joke.>>

jj - there are two on this thread posted and deleted today, so I don't think that that can be the whole story.

why would real people waste their time like this?

Dear mkataoka,

Mea Culpa. I am very sorry for causing more confusion and work for you and your IT team. It was not done with malice, as janisj stated, I was trying to top threads to sink the spam but, as a joke I did it in Korean. In hindsight it was a bad joke.

I apologize to my fellow Fodorites as well.

"why would real people waste their time like this?

Couldn't sleep.

i don't think that anyone is blaming you, cafeG, in fact i quite liked the joke. It's nice of you to apologise.

@annhig: the spammers could be real people, I have already talked to them in a small forum that I maintain. I put up captcha, I put security questions, I blocked suspicious characters in posts and names, but they can bypass all these. I then required new members to chat with me on the forum before I allowed them to post. They are real, and can very well converse with me, albeit not at a high level because they are not interested in conversations. Of course only on a small forum like mine can I do that.

As for "why would real people waste their time like this?", they might be hired and paid by the things they were marketing for. Who knows, there are plenty of weird jobs nowadays.

making links ups the website attached up the "Page" numbers, if they are on a bonus to do this (to get the site more hits as we might say) then their actions are logical. Just irritating

> As for "why would real people waste their time like this?", they might be hired and paid by the things they were marketing for. Who knows, there are plenty of weird jobs nowadays.

People working for a pittance in third-world countries.

Still full of them.
None on other forums.
Fodors answer to this problem is inadequate.
But yes who cares ?

I thought because I hadn't been on here a while, Fodor had become Korean until I came across this thread!

WoinParis: >>None on other forums.<<

The 'Korean' spam is mostly on the Europe board but other spam hits ALL of the other forums. And the mess over night seems to have been cleaned up now.