Replying to spam threads

I've noticed that we are getting a few replies when spammers post, but if everyone can resist the temptation to reply to these unwanted messages it would be much appreciated.

Making a reply will generate a notification to the original poster, thus encouraging them to think they are being noticed. Hence they keep posting. The best approach is to ignore them completely.

Many thanks!

Was only having a bit of fun john, and nothing more, but in all seriousness, the part that I do not understand is, that the posters of spam have joined Pentax User some time back, usually a year or so or more and have never made a post in all that length of time.
Maybe new people joining the forum should be required to make at least some sort of contribution in post or gallery Photo etc. and after a month or more and if they choose not to participate then they have to rejoin.
A lot of extra work for the site , I can only imagine.

I am a moderator on another forum and dealing with spam is a constant battle.

Recently we have seen many attempts by spammers to hijack older inactive accounts and post spam in their name. Requiring an inactive account to have their posts approved before being visible on the forum can help.

Inactivity and account hijack partially answers the apparent age of some of these posters' accounts but what possible value is it to a spammer advertising the best curry at a restaurant in Hyderabad? There was one a while ago advertising a funeral parlour in some dehydrated deserted part of the USA. Yes we are international but not sufficiently so to warrant a spammed ad campaign!

Many other forums have a "report this post to moderators" button, which would be handy. I for one would like to be able to help out the mods by reporting the spam.

If you scroll to the very bottom of the page, there's a 'Report Problem/Suggestion' button, next to 'Help Centre' etc.
Click that and you'll be able to submit that to moderators, and it'll relate to the page that you're on when you clicked that button.
I've used that before and it seems to work.

If everyone reported spam via the report system we'd be inundated!

By all means send a report if you think something has been missed, but we can see the spam. It's just a matter of when we happen to check. Might be straight away, might be after an hour or two.

Oh Lord, one that we banned has just popped up here in the Just Joined forums. Persistent chap who hijacked accounts, but always used the same (Russian) ip address. We solved it with an ip address block