Running a forum such as the First Great Western Coffee Shop - a public facing site for passengers (and wannabe passengers) on train services in the Thames Valley, Wessex, South Wales and the South West of England - brings in around 70 pubicly posted messages a day. Such messages are the lifeblood of the forum, and we have a large number of members, with many more viewing as guests; we believe that people come and read the site to find out about what's going on in the area, and to get answers to rail and area related questions which are otherwise hard to come by.

With our open door policy of welcoming anyone who has something to say in our speciallity area, a typical sign up request will be from someone we don't know - after all, there are millions of journeys made on First Great Western trains each year, but our membership is only around 1,600 / readership around 11,000 different people in any month. Alas, that significant readership attarcts a large number of requests to sign up from people who want to use us as a platform to advertise their products, services, scams and opinions which are well outside our areas of interest.

We have automated tools which help us categorise signups - a "three star" signup results in an email to the admin team so that we can do a quick visual check and approve most genuine newcomers quickly. "Two star" signup requests get logged and the admin team checks on them on a regular basis; less that two stars, and take a quick look every couple of days just to see if anything useful may have appeared there, but the zero star category goes further and actually bans further signup requests from that source. I'm not totally telling you how we do it (in case this is read by people who want to sign up to advertise something off topic), but I will comment that there is good co-operation between forum operators so that intelligence is shared automaticlly; "forum spammers" as they are known will cheerfully adverstise their wares on just about any site where they can find a platform.

We're so well set up to cope with these things these days that the daily effort isn't huge, and indeed some of the user names and email addresses used help to create a light amusement. From this morning ... "Skinny Grape 415", "Nauseating Dinnex", "Saphire Moot", "minor.feamail.com", "spamavert.com" and "bigdresses.pw" ... I particularly admire the cheek of the person looking to sign up to spam post the forum with a "spamavert" email address. Yeah, right ;-)
(written 2014-11-16)

 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)
  [3946] Moving from a warning system to a control system - PHP, forum spammers - (2012-12-07)
  [4135] Introducing your product to Well House Consultants - single, personally tuned email please - (2013-07-08)
  [4520] No cold sales calls please - but delighted to hear from others! - (2015-09-29)

G903 - Well House Consultants - Running and moderating forums and social media sites
  [22] Falling out over the silliest things - (2004-08-21)
  [29] Silence is Golden - (2004-08-26)
  [115] Expiration dates or times on web pages - (2004-11-12)
  [130] Spelling and grammar - (2004-11-25)
  [204] The confidence to allow public comments - (2005-02-06)
  [231] Feedback as lifeblood - (2005-02-28)
  [248] Use me, but use me effectively - (2005-03-16)
  [424] How not to run a forum - (2005-08-24)
  [516] Open source questions? Anyone can ask. - (2005-12-03)
  [651] Please Register with Opentalk - but just once! - (2006-03-19)
  [806] Check your user is human. Have him retype a word in a graphic - (2006-07-17)
  [828] Freedom of speech and freedom to post - (2006-08-10)
  [841] Forum help - a push in the right direction - (2006-08-21)
  [919] Freedom for X is denial of privacy for Y - (2006-11-09)
  [923] Why shouldn't I spam? - (2006-11-13)
  [948] Running an on line campaign - (2006-11-27)
  [1088] Why use BBC code not HTML? - (2007-02-21)
  [1190] Save the Forum - A regular clean sweep - (2007-05-17)
  [1362] No Thank You - (2007-09-23)
  [1472] The Horse goes on and on - (2007-12-15)
  [1485] Copyright and theft of images, bandwidth and members. - (2007-12-26)
  [1539] A forum is not always the best vehicle - (2008-02-14)
  [1563] Guidlines for posting on a forum - (2008-03-04)
  [1569] I dont care - goodbye - (2008-03-09)
  [1578] Please don't shout at me! - (2008-03-16)
  [1595] First Great Western Weekend - (2008-03-30)
  [1678] Software - changes and delays. But courses must run on time! - (2008-06-15)
  [1759] While the world sleeps ... - (2008-08-19)
  [1923] Making it all worthwhile - (2008-12-04)
  [1972] Pettifog and forum boards away from public view - (2009-01-03)
  [2103] Ask the Tutor - Open Source forum - (2009-03-25)
  [2116] Why do we delay new forum members through authorisation? - (2009-04-03)
  [2156] Stopping forum spam - control of the signup process - (2009-05-04)
  [2162] Admins thoughts on banning a member from a forum - (2009-05-09)
  [2254] Forum membership - a privilege not a right - (2009-06-22)
  [2386] Computing under the influence of alcohol - (2009-08-29)
  [2526] A reluctance to move from old shoes to new - (2009-12-05)
  [2527] Flying tonight - (2009-12-05)
  [2569] How to run a successful online poll / petition / survey / consultation - (2010-01-10)
  [2781] The 500 pound question to get you started - (2010-05-26)
  [2820] Netiquette for forum newcomers - (2010-06-20)
  [3479] Practical Extraction and Reporting - using Python and Extreme Programming - (2011-10-14)
  [4017] Acceptable User Policy / vexatious interacter - (2013-02-24)
  [4025] Backups, Codebase, Strategy and more - dealing with forum incidents - (2013-03-03)
  [4065] Handling requests to a forum - the background process - (2013-04-17)
  [4234] Change to Libel and Defamation laws from 1st January 2014 - (2013-12-31)
  [4239] Facebook marketing - early experiences - (2014-01-19)
  [4283] Can a legitimate forum post become illegal a year later? - (2014-07-11)
  [4307] Identifying and clearing denial of service attacks on your Apache server - (2014-09-27)
  [4403] The unbalanced relationship between customer and provider - (2015-01-21)
  [4492] Almost so wrong, but perhaps it's right for some? - (2015-05-11)

Back to PHP training - refreshed modern course, backed up by years of practical experience

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to Too many Staffies, too many lurchers

PHP - some quick fixes if scripts have issues, and how to use our support
Learning to Program - how we start to teach you at Well House Consultants
Java - an update of the basics
Too many Staffies, too many lurchers
Welcoming genuine forum posters quickly - but turning away off topic advertisers
PHP training - refreshed modern course, backed up by years of practical experience
Moving community rail support from amateur to professional
Officially overcrowded in the first year
Melksham Campus - how is it going - October 2014
Problem ... I want to print a series of numbered forms