Wednesday 4 September 2013

Why I Really Really Hate Spammers


For the last few years I've been helping moderate the Software Testing Club and earned the name The Terminator. Post some marketing bumf? Terminated.
Post a vague question easily Googled in 5 seconds? Post removed (and a helpful message sent about being specific and detailed so that you can get the help you need.)

Approving memberships has been another of my tasks to keep the site clean and useful.
Current membership of the site is 13,800 and still growing.
All memberships go through a manual approval to stop the spammers.

Recently there has been an increase in spam accounts, my mornings start with going through 30 applicants and only approving a couple of them, the rest are fake accounts.

Somewhat tiresome and frustrating and this morning I had an unfortunate incident where after deleting 10 spam accounts in a row I accidentally hit Delete on the 11th account which was genuine.

Which made me think about when I was starting testing and I found some of the testing sites on the internet, lurked for ages and then plucked up courage to become a member and start joining in.

So what if the account that I didn't approve was another me? Would they feel discouraged and not feel like being part of the online community which has been such a great help to me?

Sorry to whoever you were and I hope you try again.

And for the spammers?
I hope you get stuck in Chicago traffic for all eternity.
( in-joke for those people at CAST who got stuck trying to get to Madison)