Help & Feedback Please

Anything to make it easy on you and everyone else that halps to make this board safe from spam.

I'll support anything you have to do; you I love this board.  Thanks for all that you do!

Thanks for your work on the spamming. What if all existing posters who haven't posted spam get put on the whitelist and then any new registrations need to be "approved" in some way.

Sorry to hear about the big problems with spammers, Karen. I'm sure everyone here will be happy to agree to any reasonable measures to keep the board spam free.

First let me say how much I love all the amazing posts you all keep going here in Celebrity Hair Talk.  Although I hate to play favorites, this is one of the forums I visit every day.

This was one of the very first topics here at HairTalk as a result of JerkyFlea (thanks Flea) and many of you have been here since the beginning.

As the time has flown by here at Hairboutique.com we have tried to make lots of changes to keep up with technology which changes in a heartbeat. 

In late 2010 we started a major new technology and marketing push to refresh the site which is almost 15 years old now.

We've added lots of little things along the way and are still adding new features as we go.

A redo of the HairTalk boards were on the top of the todo list, but the major challenge is how to update the boards in such a way as to keep the existing posts and all the accounts intact.  That is no easy task as we have come to discover.

Unfortunately a group of us are now spending about 2 hours a day removing spam.  A lot of you have helped us track these messages, but usually the spammers wait until late at night to post and often post 20 messages at one pop. 

Instead of risking the loss of all the great history of posts here we have been looking at installing a new strong spam filter to block the trash postings.  We have been testing a few filter packages since June.

The downside of installing a big bad spam filter is that if a post is picked up by the filter, it holds it for a moderator to approve.  That's not the problem. We have some mods who are still active and helping us with various posts.

My concern is slowing down any legitimate posts as a result of the filter.  Especially on this board.

One option is to offer all our regulars and long time valued posters to be put on a white list or approved list to make sure none of your posts are ever flagged. 

If that seems like something the majority of you would be OK with us doing, we would start the white list with the Celebrity Hair Talk board first.  This is because I want to make sure all the regulars here have no interruption of service with a new spam filter install.

Before we unleash the spam catcher we are going to be testing it more extensively on our test servers.  However, I wanted to get some feedback for all of you here and to let you know that we are painfully aware of the problems and trying to find an easy way to move forward.

To be honest, I would rather put up with the hassles of cleaning the boards 2-4x a day then risk altering the energy of the forum.  But I understand that the spamming is only getting worse than ever before.

Your feedback would be much appreciated.  If you prefer, you can always email me at shelton@hairboutique.com or send me a Board Message.

It is my opinion that the flood of spam has hurt the boards in major ways.  So I am determined to try and figure out a better solution.  If someone has better ideas I would appreciate anything you would like to share.

Thank you so much in advance.