Our railway forum is every-popular - 30,000 visits per month (measured by Google Analytics, so that's pretty close to me saying "30,000 real visitors"), with the average visitor staying long enough to look at between five and six pages.

But, alas, our strong user base also makes us a sort-after target for "forum spammers" - people who sign up to forums to advertise their own products or the product of an organisation for whom they work. The admin team has done a superb job in filtering out these users who we can't accept because they would dilute the real content of the site to the extent that it was useless for its intended purpose, and over time I've added tools to help them pick out what's become the small minority of valid new registrations.

I've now switched from an "AWS" to an "ATC" type system - in other words from a system which warns the admin that a signup is likely to be spammerous to one which actually makes moves to control the spam by automatically blocking repeating offenders. And we'll see how it goes over the upcoming hours, days, weeks and months.

If you're reading this page because you've been directed here when you expected to find the "Coffee Shop" forum, and you're a member or you are interested in what we talk about, please send me an emaill - my email address is absurdly easy for a real user to find, and I'll see if I can sort you out. Quote "18.232.179.37" to help me spot you in our log files. If you're interested in how I do it technically, this is one of the rare occasions that I'm not going to publish the exact details - but I will tell delegates how on our PHP courses, and I'm happy to tell past delegates by email too.
(written 2012-12-07, updated 2012-12-08)

 H306 - PHP - Who is your visitor?
  [1736] Current visitors from around the world - PHP - (2008-08-04)
  [2135] What features does this visitors browser support? (PHP) - (2009-04-22)
  [2343] World Flags in your PHP pages - (2009-08-10)
  [2380] Object Oriented programming - a practical design example - (2009-08-27)
  [2667] Web page to telephone calls / links using an iPhone - (2010-03-08)
  [3094] Setting your user_agent in PHP - telling back servers who you are - (2010-12-18)

G909 - Well House Consultants - Spam, Spamming and Spammers
  [259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
  [268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
  [276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
  [338] OO techniques are hard to teach - (2005-06-06)
  [347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
  [417] Telephone Preference Service - we're registered - (2005-08-17)
  [495] More spam - a success story - (2005-11-13)
  [872] Email metrics - (2006-09-20)
  [1037] Impact Engineering and Backscatter - (2007-01-16)
  [1115] Unexpected visitors to our site - (2007-03-22)
  [1523] Ive just received an email from myself. Should I be worried? - (2008-01-29)
  [1532] Comment spam blocked. Please comment via Forums - (2008-02-05)
  [1763] Co-operating to save, yet we dont - (2008-08-21)
  [1817] Marc Schneider is still having email trouble - (2008-09-30)
  [1978] From spam to mod_alias - finding resources - (2009-01-05)
  [2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)
  [2177] Preventing forum spam - checks at sign up - (2009-05-12)
  [2179] Offers that I can refuse - (2009-05-12)
  [2276] Who is Marc Schneider of Multilingual Search Engine Optimization Inc - (2009-07-10)
  [2398] Websitemediasolution and a goldfish called Carl Johnson - (2009-09-06)
  [2697] Email metrics and filtering - (2010-03-28)
  [2884] Hotlinked images onto adult material sites - (2010-07-23)
  [3016] The legal considerations of your web presence - revisited - (2010-10-26)
  [3166] Well house is strong - confirmed? - (2011-02-11)
  [3190] What do the following web sites have in common? - (2011-03-03)
  [3316] Twitter Phishing Trips ... and a great new alert service - (2011-06-04)
  [3352] World Trade Register - Certainly NOT worth 2985 Euros. - (2011-07-09)
  [3506] Cold call contacts - preference services and turning off spam sales approaches - (2011-11-03)
  [3661] Keeping forum and blog comments clean - (2012-03-19)
  [3910] Identifying your real customers and keeping them well informed fast - (2012-11-02)
  [3912] Sand to Arabia, Coals to Newcastle or Woodburners to Russia - (2012-11-04)
  [4135] Introducing your product to Well House Consultants - single, personally tuned email please - (2013-07-08)
  [4315] Welcoming genuine forum posters quickly - but turning away off topic advertisers - (2014-11-16)
  [4520] No cold sales calls please - but delighted to hear from others! - (2015-09-29)

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