Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Sat, 10/16/2021 - 14:29

Hi all,

I liked to be subscribed to the AAVSO forums but for the last few weeks the amount of spam added to forums and then send via email to me is incredible large. So actually subscription to the forums is not longer an option for me.

As not-subscribing is not what I want I ask myself if there are any ideas (e.g. from the admins) on how to get rid of the spam in the forums. 

Ralph

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
We are working on it

Hello Ralph,

We have been experiencing weekly attacks by a very sophisticated bot or set of bots that have been able to get past all of our spam filters. This is unfortunate, and we have been looking over various methods to stop these attacks. Last week we installed new software which should help a lot in this effort. While some spam still got through this past weekend, they were over 200+ posts that were blocked. Yesterday, in response to the missed messages we have tweaked the settings even more and will hopefully be able to catch these even more efficiently. We do apologize for the inconvenience this has caused and we are working very hard to make sure this doesn't keep happening. 

Sincerely, 
Bert Pablo
Staff Astronomer, AAVSO