New anti-spam message limits appear to be working
The only way that someone can send you a message through Biznik is if they first join as a member. Up until now, that’s proven totally effective in deterring would-be spammers - they haven’t been joiners. Until now. The same guy who spammed nearly 200 members early Tuesday morning tried to repeat his stunt again early this morning. But this time, he was tripped up by the 5-message limit, which I imposed yesterday to limit this type of damage (which has resulted in one member leaving Biznik - nobody likes being spammed).
The limitation works like this: If you’re a free member of Biznik, you can now send only 5 messages per day through Biznik. (Supporting members can send unlimited messages.) The spammer apparently thought, “hmm, I’ll just create another profile…” and did so long enough to send out another round of 5 spam messages…but then apparently decided there were better things to do than to create a new profile for every 5 messages sent.
So, if you were one of the 10 people to receive spam overnight, bear with us - the system is working, and we’re keeping a very close eye on ways to further tighten things while at the same time remaining committed to the fundamental openness that makes this business networking group so great.
If you’ve got some more ideas for ways to fight member spam, I’d love to hear them.
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:07 am
Right on. Spammers suck. If you’re getting spam e-mail, use Outlook, and want an awesome free program to stop it, check out Spambayes: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/. It learns as it goes and is something I recomend to all my clients.
August 2nd, 2006 at 3:27 pm
Dan,
Thanks for thinking about us and taking action to protect the membership. I was online on BizNik when the first spammer hit and thought his name looked kind of odd. I did not alert ya due to there are a lot of members filling in their profiles in all lower case or other methods that are not conventional. I have been reading some very interesting blogs from, I can only assume, hackers and spammers who are teaming up to make our lives even more SPAM-Filled. Seems it is a game they like to play, but in this case they are getting paid to do it. Some of the reasoning spammers do what they are doing is political and some has no apparent reasoning, but all of it is due to someone paying them a lot of money to do what they are doing.
Anyway, again thanks for taking action to do what you can to rid us of this menace.