tabulas

I hate spam. Hate, hate hate it. I believe it completely ruins Tabulas. I was gone last week for work, and when I got back, the site was overrun with spammers!

Now, let me just say that before last week, I'd spend about 10-15 minutes every night manually checking accounts (I have tools to make it easy for me) and deleting the spammer accounts. But they made a change last week and decided to simply overwhelm the site.

So I had to write some automated tools. I am now looking at the content of entries and determining whether they are spammy, and automatically banning them. If your site gets caught in the, my deepest apologies. So far, nobody innocent seems to have been caught.

Some other changes I made: New accounts cannot be created from certain countries which have a high tendency for spam accounts. I've also disallowed search engine indexing on new accounts created within 30 days to discourage these spammers from getting page rank information.

I've also cleaned up the user directory - only fully registered users will show up - hopefully this will help more in discovering non-fake users.

Comments, even from registered users, will now go through our comment filter (I was previously only doing it for guest users) - this will protect you from some spammers who are now using registered accounts to post spammy content.

I will continue to build tools to get smarter about detecting and shutting down these spam sites proactively.

My thanks to all of you for your patience in the matter!