Unbelievable!!!

LOL -I didn't know what the flag button was SH -now i do i will help :)

you and me spritz.
I tend to copy and paste the comment in the box saves time.

will do,as it spoils my coffee time to be met with this instead of reading about friends gardens and plants,

I've flagged all of them. Never seen anything like it. Really annoying!

Will do, had to flag yesterday, but only 4.
this happened a few werks ago, about 3 full pages

See what you mean spritzhenry. I've also flagged them all

One or more of them is about the lost aeroplane, its sick.

Pam, they just take any random text and insert hidden ads in there. It's not malicious in any way, just dishonest people in the Far East trying to sell stuff. It is extremely annoying though, and I wish they didn't get through, but I guess it's hard to screen them.

Can't see any problem with them myself. It's not as if this is a gardening forum where blogs are garden related.

Some very interesting news stories for those of us unable to watch much telly because we are working all hours in the garden and greenhouse.

Ha ha Scrumpy!

Thats the nice thing about goy......its fun!

I just sent a thanks to admin he got rid of them quickly, even the one that arrived this afternoon

That is very selfish as I hadn't read them all.

Well done Pam, I only saw one so they were very quick off the mark this time,.......

lol Scrumpy! :)

Haven't seen any!

I'm not complaining but I never seem to get them.

Nor me !

with you 100%, Spritz - this is one "garden pest" we can all do wityhout

I've never seen them either but then I only read & comment on blogs in my News!

I think that the place for news items is on a news site. The theme of a GARDENING forrum should be garden-related.

I checked your profile, Scrumpygraham - no profile, no pics, no blogs, no plants - and you joined in January 2011. Been too busy with the news?

Thanks, everyone, and thanks to the team for their fast deleting! I was so annoyed yesterday to be met by so many adverts. :-X

Just 4 this morning......
agreed Fran.....

If we all keep flagging maybe the 'advertisers' will get the message?

lol Spritz, one needs a working brain to be able to get a message! woudln't be surprised if a lot of these were computer-generated, maybe sending the same spam to fifty or a hundred different groups aroune the world.

Can't imagine a real person being so brain-dead as to physically tupe out all this rubbish and post it one at a time tothis gorup or that.

Sadly, this is the price we have to pay for having an open and accessible group - the door's open, weeds can drift in. The only way to aviod it, or at least minimise it, is to have to regsiter and get vetted as being a real person before being alloewd to post. That would give the group owners a heck of a lot of work!

"the price of liberty is eternal vigilance" - all we can realistically do is to weed these pests out as and when they spring up and keep an eye out for new infestations.

Too true, Fran. I hadn't thought of the adverts being computer generated, but it would take too long to type all that stuff in so you must be right!

Makes sense to me too, I rarely read any but the language is usually fractured english, must be an illiterate computer :0)

and we only know about GoY spam, could be amillion others getting the same junk. though i don't know what the point of some of it is, just meaningless long rambles, no links to click to get your id stolen. there must be a reason, they wouldn't do it if there wasn't a chance of profit in it - unless someone's just out to cause trouble for trouble's sake. sadly, the world's not short of them, either.

"just meaningless long rambles"

Sounds like someone who used to post on here..........

They are often posted by people in desperate need of money in the far east. there was a documentary about it on one of the sky channels. They get paid a pittance for every 1000 they post.

Has scrumpyg removed his sweetpea and dahlia blogs then? that's a shame as they were very informative.

Nothing under any available cateogry, Seaburngirl, which ws why i wasa a bit wary.

sorry, Scrumpygraham!

I think he re-edits them from growing season to season.

I seem to be lucky in avoiding spam, but a friend copied to me one she'd got, it was long, rambing, no point (or too many different points, all diffuse) - and made no sense at all. Can't understand why it was posted at all, let alone posted on a gardening group - it wouldn't hae made sense anywhere! And no obvious attempt to phish, no "follow this link" etc.

How strange!

I'm an admin for a forum & I get people registering all the time. At first I just deleted their posts then I started to ban them, none of this worked for long as they just came back & registered with a new name! The I discovered I could stop them from posting if I set the controls to advise me first BEFORE they could post anything. I had to "approve" a new member before they could make a first post! That stopped them DEAD!!!

I used to search them out on a forum called "Stopforumspam.com". This has a list of people who are "spammers" & is updated very frequently during the day. I also used to search for them on Google & would find they had joined 100s of forums. I'd click on a few of these forums to see their posts. Invariably they were spam.

Now I just have to see their username or email address to know whether they are true potential members or not. Most days I get a couple of warnings & have to refuse their "request" to join the forum! I've been able to keep the forum free of spammer for years now!

At the end of last year I was getting so many "requests" I had to turn off the registry process for a couple of months! One person from China was registering with slight variations of his name a 12 times a day at least! That was when I decided to turn off the registering on the forum!

My email inbox was filling up with all the requests I was getting! Now I only get a couple of requests a day some days. I can deal with that!

Good gracious - it must be very time consuming!

making a site secure is really hard work, if it's a successful site (I had a yahoo group writing forum which wasn't nrearly so much hard work!)

Some sites use "Capcha" - people have to type in what's on the blurred picture before they can register. I find these awful, having blurred vision anyway! and the "audio option" is equally useless to someone who has tinnitus! which of the blurred sounds are the ones I'm supposed to be taking note of??

Other sites use question-and-answer - "how much is two and three? type the answer in words in the box" or "what colour is snow?" these are to prevent computers systems from registering, but they wouldn't stop people, though they might slow them down a bit.

It's such a shame that there are such people, whose only "pleasure" is to cause trouble and make life harder for those who want to share. It makes running a site a full-time job, so congratulations for finding a way round it, Balcony! and for caring enough to look for a way round it, rather than giving up in depair

25 this morning folks :0 (

Took drinking two cups of coffee this time, think I've got them all at the moment,SIGH...