The forum software we're running has a variety of tools at work against spammers. They still get through at times, but we hope it's rare now and will become more rare in the future. The reason for this optimism is that one of our tools is a spam filter that "learns". It watches what the other filters think is spam and also can be told specifically by the web team that a particular posting is or isn't spam. So it should get better with time and experience.

However, we are currently rather fortunate that we haven't had much spam dumped here. I think that I've personally marked about half a dozen postings as spam, and of course those users have been kicked off the system, so they don't get a chance to repeat it.

But each time I point out some spam to the filter, it tries to match it against all new postings, and it seems to be a little more "inclusive" than is good. I've noticed that after I mark some postings as spam, a number of very legitimate postings get marked as spam by the filter. When I find them and mark them as not spam, then the filter seems to stop picking up other legit postings.

If your posting gets flagged as spam, please be patient. When I see it, I'm sure I'll clear the flag and your posting will appear. Usually this only takes a little while, but of course, I do leave the helm sometimes, so it could take a day or two. If you want to be sure, you can contact me through the website contact form; just send it to the website/forum issues category.

If you're unsure about what is spam (or other unacceptable material), just have a quick visit to our Terms and Conditions page. It's a reasonably short statement and not to legalistic.

Thanks!