I fear that it will, at least so long as most web actions remain unaccountable for. Spam has many similarities to viruses - it's a constant war to stay ahead of the latest mutation, which makes a single stable "cure" unlikely over the long haul.

It has been a comedy of errors in terms of getting back to camp, with the latest one being me injuring my hand sparring with Thea's dog, Sherlock. If only I had teeth like his, large, bright, white and ridiculously strong! My left(dominant) hand appears to have improved today to the extent where I can type and use a mouse but am unsure how it will go lifting. I'm heading out to my camp with a friend in 3 hours(it is 6am here) to remove valuables and rubbish from my camp, and will return to stay as soon as I can.

I've learned a lot from this experience so far, and will update those insights in the going bush thread before I leave :)

Have you done web design before? You appear to have some coding experience from what I've seen on these forums. I was only a novice myself(even with formal studies) and this sort of thing was included in all forum software. Given the time it takes to create an account on GOG it isn't easy to circumvent a time delay in creating new posts. Already posts in a thread are merged if multiple posts occur without response. To circumvent such code would require the servers to be hacked, which the spammers on these forums do not appear to be capable of. They appear to run a very basic script that creates a new topic and loop it.

Surely any improvement over the current laborious anti-spam measures would be an um improvement? :P

I've been programming for about 30 years now. Web applications have been my bread-and-butter for around 12-15 of those years. So yah. :)

They are, but you have to remember that every response has people* who push back against it, looking for a new way to circumvent and/or exploit the fix. It's an evolving battle, not a fixed problem with a single solution. Therein lies the rub.

* I hesitate to categorise spammers and virus writers as people, but they are so at least in the eyes of the law.

I thought you "knew your shit" based on posts I have seen. I haven't seen a forum with the user base GOG has, that has so many issues that can at least be attempted to be resolved with some basic counter-measures.

Assigning a person to combat spam rather than attempting to resolve or restrain the issue via code seems a bit labour intensive to me :)

Edit: that every time the forums are spammed, people take time clicking a little minus and then "report spam" is also way too labour intensive.

It's sometimes the only solution though, at least in certain circumstances. There are posts which a human being can tell instantly are spam, but which are designed to baffle pattern recognition algorithms who do the same job.

It goes back to the conundrum of there being some things which computers can do far better than us, and some things which they are still far behind on. Maybe not as bad as the computers on Star Trek which short out when confronted with the concept of "love", but nearly so. :)

Spammers are really lowest of the low. The pariahs of the internet.

Virus writing is actually a very interesting and intellectually challenging thing. Today's viruses with self-mutating code and rootkits that put the whole OS into a VM - very fascinating stuff. The problem is the malicious intent and I see this mostly with the people who put the exploits in some toolkit so that every script kiddie that has yet to grow hair on their privates can use them.

That's why, when the big spam wave hit, I wrote some scripts/bookmarklets that allowed for mass reporting the spam threads (and bringing the browser to a crawl ;-)). They are buried somewhere in the "We are under attack"-thread.

Oh I can understand the human element being a necessary overseer. What would the downsides be of implementing a system on the forums where a new thread can only be made every x amount of minutes, where x = the velocity of an unladen swallow?

Speaking of AI, consciousness and "humanity", I'd highly recommend the movie Chappie. Thea and I saw it yesterday and loved it :) It is written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, the guy who wrote and directed District 9.

"Humanity" has reached an all-time high when a story about AI and consciousness provokes intense discussion about... Hugh Jackman's haircut
Ah I was going to ask if someone had done that. Good job old chap! :)

Edited for early morning incoherence :P

Nigerian princes
Thread necromancers
Spammers

; )

I'm waiting for someone to write a friendly virus that - once it infects a machine - turns on Windows Firewall, activates facebook privacy settings, and disables browser add-on toolbars.

"Shit - my PC got infected and has never run better!"

I think this has already been done, at least there was an attempt to create an anti-virus-virus to battle some large bot net. Some of the viruses (that turn user PCs into botnet zombies) actually delete competing "products" from the infected machine.

NEWS FLASH (relevant to all Insomnia threads): Jack Keane is on special on that other unnamed game distribution service :P

But it performs very weak over there. It Isn't even able to keane there ;).

whats the big problem with them?

Nothing, really. Just making a joke. In my mind I was going to make a list of real internet pariahs, such as peddlers of kiddie porn, and put Spammers at the top, but figured the light-hearted route was the better way to go.

They grant terrible unlife to fabrics. That shit is whack.