It appears, Lynn, that the captcha (squiggly letters and numbers you have to enter to sign up) that defeats spam bots is being circumvented by legions of actual people sent to spam forums manually. A terrible economy worldwide can be quite the motivator and the bottom feeders are clearly desperate. Robert zaps these topics by day, and I usually patrol for them at night. Last few days, though, I haven't logged in...been logging lots and lots of landings instead - day and night - and making sure nothing went astray during the recent annual so that I don't terrify poor Robert when we go to the West Coast Bellanca Fly-In soon.
Strange thing is that I was most vigilant for awhile there and never found a one of the silly things. Thus I guess karma dictates that if I keep logging in there won't be any :roll:
One thing I'd advise everyone is don't respond - DO NOT RESPOND - to any of these spam topics. Yes, I know, I goofed up once myself on this. Thing is, whenever there is a response, the spammer gets notified and, thus, keeps us on their active list.
The only way to shut the suckers out is to make this forum read-only for the public and allow postings by members only. You'd have to enter your membership number to start topics and/or respond to them. That would truly suck, however, because it would turn away our curious fellow aviators who don't know our aircraft but are interested and have questions. To me that would be like chatting only with people based at your airfield and ignoring all visitors.
In short, folks are on combat spam patrols. Best and only solution I can see really. Looks like they need to be stepped up a bit.
Jonathan
