Redrock Outdoors News And Views

I’m not sure if any legitimate visitor to this site knew we had a Forum area setup, but the Spammers got hold of it somehow and for the last couple of months, we’ve been waging a silent battle of attrition with those worthless Bastards!  In case you’re wondering, it goes something like this.  We setup the forum, get it all organized and structured and then turn it loose on the world.  A while later, some web crawler identifies the site as a forum, and the next thing we know, the thing is full of ads for Viagra or some porn site.  First round in the battle, we start to block IP Addresses from around the world.  There are huge chunks of addresses that have been assigned to places like Russia, and so we block those at first.  Not just Russia, but Ukraine, Bulgaria, all sorts of countries from across the pond.  Things quiet down for a while, then the next thing we know, we’re getting tons of posts from South American addresses. 

There are a few more things we could have done to fight the battle, we changed the board so you had to be validated before you could post, but then our mail server just got buried in mail from the system, telling us some guy with some name that was no more than just some random collection of letters at gmail wants to join.  As it turns out, we do indeed have better things to do than deal with this kind of crap, and since legitimate users weren’t posting anything substantial, we’ve decided to give up on it.

We’re going to pull the plug on the forum completely.  In its place, we’ll use this Blog area and while it won’t be quite as nice as a well mannered Forum is, we’ll just have to make do   As we get rolling on this, we’re going to start out nice and open at first, until we find that this area is getting filled up with useless junk, and when that happens we’ll tighten down the screws until we get the spammers evicted.  I hope you’ll stick with us through it all, and in fact I really hope you’ll feel compelled to add real comment or two from time to time.  We really did intend for this site to be a legitimate resource, and we know we’re not the only folks around who know stuff, so sound off, jump in and let your own voice get added to the mix.  Just don’t bother us with ads for stuff that supposed to make us get a “bigger Johnson”.