Seriously, isn’t there any way to stop this bastard?
It has been suggested previously that people should not be able to post on the forum within a short time of signing up. The objection was that it would be bad for newbies who are lost and need help. I suggested that a good solution would be to make the time period in which people cannot post very short, like a few minutes. This would at least slow down the spammers.
The spammers continued posting one or two new ‘threads’ per minute. “Recently Active Threads” was flooded with their unsightly threads that included only one post.
I wonder whether or not they change their E-mail addresses very often.
In addition, when they register their E-mail address with LingQ, do they use their real one?
Are the telephone numbers in the spam really intended to get calls from prospective customers? If that is the case, they are doing futile things. Poor old astrologer!
looks like i can’t procrastinate on the forums now…
Maybe we have to introduce again the letters and numbers before we can write something in the forum.
Perhaps this additional obstacle can stop these mad people who place here their stupid ads?
Are the spammers procrastinating, or are they diligently spamming to get money from ‘astrologers’?
yutaka, the spammers are definitely trying to get money, but by blocking up the forums with their constant ads, they are preventing me from procrastinating and reading every topic under “recently active” column before finally opening my lessons and learning a thing of two.
I don’t even understand how mr black magic found LingQ anyway…
oh, well now it looks like his account was deleted. Thank you admin 
I don’t know why they continue doing that because within minutes their posts were deleted. Mark asked me if I could help while the Canadians are sleeping, and I agreed and I’ve deleted about 200 threads since yesterday. I deleted about 30 threads from the last 15 minutes! They must be really stupid because they should recognize that it is worthless what they are doing.
The problem is that they use different users and email addresses. Otherwise it would be easy. I have only permission to delete forum threads now, I cannot delete a user - and I don’t want to 
Adding a captcha would slow them done, but not only them. This would affect all of us.
LingQ has to find an intelligent way to stop them from spamming. If I were they I would probably create rules like:
- User that have signed up less than 3 days ago for a FREE account have a Captcha.
- These users have only permission for 2 or 3 threads per hour.
- Users that have spammed should be blocked immediately.
@Dobie42: As I wrote above I’ve not the rights to delete the accounts (it was more than one), but I’ve deleted these threads.
Thank you, VeraI.
@Vera:
"- User that have signed up less than 3 days ago for a FREE account have a Captcha.
- These users have only permission for 2 or 3 threads per hour.
- Users that have spammed should be blocked immediately."
I agree, these are good suggestions, IMO.
To be honest, I don’t see why new basic level members should be allowed to create more than one thread per day - at least not during the first week of their membership. Also, one could perhaps limit new basic level members to (say) 25 forum posts per day during their first week?
The rule should be simple.
If they register a false email address with LingQ, stopping them from getting a LingQ account might be easy.
I don’t know whether it is necessary for us to prove the existence of the email address when we get an account on LingQ.
It’s true - if new users had to confirm their e-mail address, it would stop the use of fake e-mails.
(Still, a really determined spammer might set up a large number of e-mail accounts, I guess? But it would probably make things more difficult for him/her.)
You can’t use the same email more than once and a confirmation email is sent, and only after the email has been confirmed is the account activated.
It takes a minute only to create a new e-mail account.
This time it has stopped after 6 threads. Maybe they got tired …
Another idea to stop these spammers: Give Premium members the option to flag people as spammers. If 2 or 3 members have done this, then let this user not post on the forum any longer. An administrator can check this later and delete this member or delete the flag.