The Upholstery Forum

Several forums and blogs I visit have / had problems with spam. One way many bloggers stop spam is to charge their users a fee to post. I would gladly pay $1 to join this forum, how does everybody else feel about also doing that - since we are already members we likely wouldn't have to pay, but think of if you just found this forum and wanted to join, would you pay $1?
Plus the possible hassle for the website owners to set up a payment system...

Bright side is if the spammers want to pay $1 then The Uhpolstery Forum might get rich.

Anybody have other ideas for stopping spammers?

I know spam has become an inevitable part of cyberlife, and if everything was all still analog like "the good old days" then we wouldn't be here helping each other. So this is just me and my curious mind wondering about ideas for stopping spam. Ideas? Opinions?

Yes I would be glad to join/rejoin the group and pay a one time fee to belong. Actually a one time fee of $1 to $5 would not be unreasonable. I'm by no means a computer expert but do the spam posters actually belong to the forum and this is how they can post?
I'm willing to help out in any way I can to get rid of the spam posts including paying a reasonable fee to use and or post to the forum.

I'm wondering if existing members have been hacked as it seems most of the spam posts are from one user per day. It's become a real pain. I wonder if the forum was just shut down for a few days if that would help, kind of like a restart?

I used to administrate a Jr Dragster forum and we were hit like this from time to time. I don't recall exactly how we managed to weed them out. IIRC i think it was either each new member had to be approved before the could post or each new members first (or first few) posts had to be approved by admin or a mod before it was live.

It can be very difficult to clean it all up and prevent future hacks so please try to be patient with the admin here.

I know I was logging to my site every morning and evening and spent at least an hour each time cleaning things up daily.

Thank you all so much for your input! We really appreciate how much you all enjoy and use the forum! I will discuss these suggestions with John and our web team to work on getting this spam issue fixed! Again, we are so sorry about this and appreciate your patience and understanding as we fix this issue!

Hi Everyone,
While we are working on the best way to secure the forum, we have figured out a way to target the "T e m u" spam, by censoring the word "T e m u". When someone types this word, our system will automatically change it to "SPAM DO NOT CLICK" this will hopefully discourage spam posts, as none of the links they are profiting from will work. Please report these posts if you see them. Again, we appreciate your patience and understanding as we figure out the best way to fix this issue, and prevent it in the future.

One thing I've noticed is that the spam garbage shows that people have actually vieewed them. Maybe if everybody stops opening them it might stop? Grasping at straws here ....