Conrad
2008-08-09 15:31:14 UTC
Hey, guys -
Over the past year or more, we've had a spammer on our group.
He's an ideological spammer:
There's a disputed area of Shakespeare research, called the authorship
question -- some people believe William Shakespeare did not actually
write the plays, which scholarly researchers (at universities, with
tenure) largely rule out of court, kind-of like the way biologists
rule creationism out of court.
So, they organize on the web, and on the usenet: and those who (like
myself) disagree with them mostly do it in an occasionally heated way,
but still in the form of a conversation.
The spammer, "Agent Jim," though, has a brief blurb with a few links
to his websites. He claims to have disproven the authorship
challengers once and for all (which is fine), but he keeps reposting
this blurb. Over the past year it's gotten really bad.
We have a couple of arguments for it being spam:
1. It's the exact same post; he only changes his name (sometimes
adopting names similar to people he dislikes in the group).
2. He has recently explained in a related, moderated forum that he
does it to break up discourse on the unmoderated site. (A few days
later the moderators of that forum bounced him for bad behavior.)
3. On a surveymonkey survey recently, posted over a few days on the
group, 100% of respondants said it was spam.
We're lit geeks, and don't know how to do the math spam index thing.
We'd *really* like to be able to talk about Shakespeare again...
Conrad.
ps - Some are pretty skeptical about moderating the group, since
people on the two sides of the debate consider one another biased
(with some justification). The spammer uses anonymous remailers: is
there anything we can do about this?
C.
Over the past year or more, we've had a spammer on our group.
He's an ideological spammer:
There's a disputed area of Shakespeare research, called the authorship
question -- some people believe William Shakespeare did not actually
write the plays, which scholarly researchers (at universities, with
tenure) largely rule out of court, kind-of like the way biologists
rule creationism out of court.
So, they organize on the web, and on the usenet: and those who (like
myself) disagree with them mostly do it in an occasionally heated way,
but still in the form of a conversation.
The spammer, "Agent Jim," though, has a brief blurb with a few links
to his websites. He claims to have disproven the authorship
challengers once and for all (which is fine), but he keeps reposting
this blurb. Over the past year it's gotten really bad.
We have a couple of arguments for it being spam:
1. It's the exact same post; he only changes his name (sometimes
adopting names similar to people he dislikes in the group).
2. He has recently explained in a related, moderated forum that he
does it to break up discourse on the unmoderated site. (A few days
later the moderators of that forum bounced him for bad behavior.)
3. On a surveymonkey survey recently, posted over a few days on the
group, 100% of respondants said it was spam.
We're lit geeks, and don't know how to do the math spam index thing.
We'd *really* like to be able to talk about Shakespeare again...
Conrad.
ps - Some are pretty skeptical about moderating the group, since
people on the two sides of the debate consider one another biased
(with some justification). The spammer uses anonymous remailers: is
there anything we can do about this?
C.