Message #74315

[Cathy S]

Susan has already indicated that she will look into authentication for the blogs as well as groups. 

As to your second question Gee, it isn't just the blogs that get targeted.  There are other areas that have been spammed but Susan is very diligent at keeping the site tidy.  It is a question of finding a balance between inconvenience to members having to authenticate every entry and the time it takes to tidy up the spam left by the bots in the first place.

It is not unique to this site, any site that allows member contribution can be open to spambots and it is nothing to do with the system architecture of the site now compared to the previous version - it is because the spam bots are becoming increasingly sophisticated at finding ways past the protections.  Spam attacks on e-mail inboxes, which is what Chikky started this thread about, are somewhat different and there are good filters that keep it at bay.

By the way, it is very easy to get drawn into spamming - how many people have forwarded one of those e-mails saying "WARNING  don't open the e-mail called blah blah with an attachment called XYZ it contains the most vicious known virus" - the majority of those are hoax virus warnings intended to create high volumes of internet traffic and slow systems down ... it is a form of spam because it is totally unnecessary.   If you receive one of these it takes less than a minute to run a check on a search engine that will confirm it is a known hoax and you can delete that bit of spam instead of growing it!