RealityStudio.org

It's finally happened. Some idiot spammer came through here and posted a bunch of links to poker and online gambling sites. Naturally I deleted them.

To further protect against spam, I've now disabled guests from posting. What this means is that, if you're a guest and not a registered user of this forum, you may read but not write posts. If you want to write a post, you must now register.

Registering is a simple process. You fill out the registration form, provide a valid email address, and the board will send you a verification email. After that you just log in with your user name and password whenever you visit.

It's very simple. Hopefully this won't cause much hassle for anyone, since the bulk of you have already registered.

UPDATE: ALL NEW USERS HAVE TO BE APPROVED BY THE FORUM ADMINISTRATOR. It remains a simple process. Fill out the registration form and wait for approval. I'm online a lot, so you shouldn't have to wait long. Apologies to anyone who feels inconvenienced by this, but it's necessary in the ever wearisome battle against asshole spammers.

Thank you!

It happened again you mean? It happened a while back, and it was gambling stuff. Lee felt it was a bot. So it's only a matter of time before they program them with emails too. Speaking of technology which can be wonderful at times and annoying at others:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0, ... ories_html

I missed that first spam post. I just searched through the forum using a number of different search strings and deleted the last remaining bit of spam that I could find. If anybody sees any others, please post a reply here to tell me where it is and I'll delete it.

(I'm presuming that, while some of you may be interested in gambling, you'd prefer not to read spam about texas hold 'em and sports betting!)

Robots, man, they're taking over!!! Next thing you know, it'll be the commies!

It's almost not funny. You'd be amazed what a pain in the ass it gets to be moderating any community-based site. I've got half a dozen anti-spam tools running on PervScan.com and I still end up manually filtering out anywhere from thirty to a hundred bits of spam per day. And that's not counting all the email spam that gets past my ten mail filters.

The flip side, though, is that a robust community of users makes it all worthwhile. A group can add to a site in ways that an individual never could. It's that "third mind" effect. We're some sorta Burroughs super-brain here.

We love you too! Someone break out the K.Y. already! But yeah, I'm sure it must be difficult dealing with spam like that, it was only a matter of time before they came here. Changing the forums so only registered users could post was inevitable.

Just read that article (yes, I was too lazy the other day). I remember reading several things on flexible LCD displays, but I had no idea there were something so cheap in development. It reminds of the book The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. A college professor recomended it to us during the summer before we took his physics course, but I never finished it cause I got a late start and I've lost the book by now. But that story reminded me of it. In the book, there's a scene where the characters are eating food with chopsticks, and the chopsticks have animated ads on them. Kinda freaky to think that one day, even the cheapest disposible items might have bright flashing ads on them for viagra or car insurance.

Another idiot spammer started an insidious attack registering false user names. Because of this, I have no had to set up the forum so that all new user accounts have to be approved by the administrator (me).

This shouldn't inconvenience anybody, but if you see anything that looks suspicious or spam-like, please let me know.

Thanks!

P.S. Also as a result of this worm, I had to search through the database and delete a number of bogus accounts. I tried to be very careful doing this. However, if I inadvertently deleted a legitimate user, I apologize. Please take the time to re-register. Thank you!

I enjoyed seeing the "new" video from '71 . I immediately recognized Burroughs speech at the end as coming from Todd Brownings' 1930's film FREAKS.

aww, damn spammers. They ruin things for everyone. I pop into a forum for my favourite band, and one time we logged in to find a ton of bad porno links. (wouldnt have minded ut they were BAD porno links)

And i used to run a website for a local "'young people's" charity, and one day we had a load of spam for viagra... thank goodness i was able to delete them all in time!

Yeah, the spammers are a drag. I started getting 40 spam registrations a day and I just couldn't deal with it anymore. There has been a tremendous upsurge in spam attacks on phpbb forums. Evidently spammers cracked the CAPTCHA system. What particularly sucks is that I was moderating them all anyway. To the best of my knowledge, not a single spam registration made it through to the live site. Do the spammers never check to see if their registrations are successful? Jesus...