A language learners’ forum

This week I've turned on IP Address checking. This means that each user’s IP address is checked against the following DNSBL services on registration and posting: http://spamcop.net and http://www.spamhaus.org. This lookup may take a while so you might experiance a slight delay with posts. In addition, if your ISP or the dynamic IP address you are issued has been used by spammers in the past you might be blocked by the system. If this happened, you can try switching off & on your router to get a new IP address. If you ISP has been blacklisted, you'll have get them to have themselves taken off the blacklist.

In 99% of cases this will not affect anyone, but if you are affected and switching your router on and off hasn't resolved the problem please contact the moderators on Facebook or twitter.

The reason I've turned this facility on is because we are currently experiencing another wave of spam from known spamming sites. You've not seen these since you'll only see approved posts and obviously we just ban the account and delete all the spam, but the sheer volume is causing a lot of hassle for the moderation team. This IP checking will stop blacklisted IP posting and account creation and will save a lot of manual work for the moderation team.

I apologise in advance if you are adversely affected by this change but hope you understand your moderation team are volunteers and anti-spam moderation is becoming a full time job. On the brightside it shows the usefulness and popularity of the site and it’s growing ranking in the search engines because of the useful and interesting contributions you are all making!

rdearman wrote:The reason I've turned this facility on is because we are currently experiencing another wave of spam from known spamming sites.

So many Viagra spam posts. So many porn ads. Every time I reloaded, there were another 2 or 3 to moderate. The entire moderation and admin team was becoming cranky.

And the spammers didn't even have the decency to post multi-lingual spam! You'd hope they'd at least try to get into the spirit of things, and give us an opportunity to learn how to say "cheap pills online" in as many languages as possible. But no, it's almost all in English.

Our apologies for all the little things like this that make singing up more difficult than we'd like: the minimum post requirement to get certain features, the moderation of new posts, and now the IP address blacklist. But nobody wants to come on the forum and see that their favorite log has been updated twice, only to find out that both ads were for porn sites.

Thank you to the administrators and moderators for all the hard work you do in keeping this forum running.

emk wrote:So many Viagra spam posts. So many porn ads. Every time I reloaded, there were another 2 or 3 to moderate. The entire moderation and admin team was becoming cranky.

And the spammers didn't even have the decency to post multi-lingual spam! You'd hope they'd at least try to get into the spirit of things, and give us an opportunity to learn how to say "cheap pills online" in as many languages as possible. But no, it's almost all in English.

You must be logging in at the wrong time Emk, I've come across plenty of Russian porn and medicine spam posts! Often 5 or 6 in the space of less than half an hour. Have to admit a lot of the language wasn't particularly relevant to myself but anything for practise

Yeah, half a dozen on average (11 notifications at most). I'm glad that the chaos is over.

If you need to contact us because your IP has been blocked you can use Facebook or Twitter.

On Facebook search for HTLAL Community Center (note it's the American spelling).

To get us on Twitter use HTLAL@HTLALnews

Rdearman, would you care to edit the OP so this info is more prominent? We might create LLOrg-based ones but for the moment the emergency HTLAL contact details will do.

I must just have the good fortune of always logging in after the mods have cleaned things up, but I've never seen this spam here! And my "homepage" is the "all unread messages" page. :fingers-crossed:

arthaey wrote:I must just have the good fortune of always logging in after the mods have cleaned things up, but I've never seen this spam here! And my "homepage" is the "all unread messages" page. :fingers-crossed:

We have the forum set to require manual approval of a new user's first three messages. We stop the spam before you see it! Unfortunately, this may mean a delay of a couple of hours to post somebody's first message if no moderators are online.

If this feature had not been on, you would have seen a deluge of spam during the last week or two. This is why we can't have nice things.

Rhian wrote:Have to admit a lot of the language wasn't particularly relevant to myself but anything for practise

I agree. Sometimes when the spams were in Hangeul which I can read about 20%, I used that practise.

Just a random example screenshot Obviously none of this was approved.