Ask anyone who has achieved even a modest amount of success at their craft and they will tell you that it comes at a price. In the overall scheme of things in this world of ours, the existence of this forum is minuscule. However, we officially opened our doors on January 3rd of this year and after a mere 79 days, the membership has transcended 500 and the post count surpassed 10,000 (until I deleted a few things) .
During that period, the Google bots have been crawling around our site gathering whatever key information they need to rank the forum when people do a search for something related to these tractors. I now see that the BING bots are here as well and all of that is good news to Charles, Jack and myself because we want people to find us quickly and easily. The unfortunate part of this ongoing success is SPAM. Charles has made it very simple and easy to become a member of our site and while that is a good thing for the bona fide members, it also opens the door for the SPAM BOTS that are programmed to automatically join sites like this one and then post advertisements without our express permission.
Some of you have seen these ads appear. This morning, I removed two such ads placed by the bogus member "Best Deals". Shortly, Charles will remove Best Deals from our members list and impose a ban on that ID. As idealistic a move as that is, we know that it is impossible to keep Spambots out of this site just as it is impossible to permanently keep out some of the former members that have been banned. The best that we can do is to CONTROL the site by swiftly removing unwanted posts from the forums and bulletin boards followed by the removal of the party that placed those posts.
There are four of us in ADMIN who are very active each day on this site, monitoring every post that takes place. Some of you have posted comments in the threads started by the SPAMMERS and I'm fine with that as long as you realize that one of us are going to zap that thread PDQ.
As this site continues to grow in membership and as time passes, more and more of these SpamBots are going to find there way inside the site and post. Charles will begin defensive measures to keep them out but that means a slight increase in difficulty to join the site. All applicants are approved automatically at the moment. We do not conduct individual screenings like some sites do because for the most part, they are unnecessary as well as being highly time-consuming. Instead, Charles will implement hurdles that SpamBots cannot jump but humans can.
Sorry about the SPAM.... but it just goes with the territory.
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