I just wanted to voice my complaint about the limitations on this board.

This is a chat board, not a credit check. It's frustrating when I can't PM another user or have access to a user's direct email address.

Every other chat board I participate on, I have the option to show as much or as little personal information as I want. So why can't it be the same way here?

Just my 2 cents.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: CMBDJ,

all the restrictions we have in place are there to help prevent spam. Both on the board and for you all. Every user is more than welcome to include whatever information they want viewable to all in the signature of their post. this can be edited in the users profile.

Sincerely,

Privacy concerns are a major source of lawsuits on the internet. ESPECIALLY when companies say one thing and do something else.

Such as "we won't share your data" and then they start selling it to anyone. I hate that.

Personally, I am totally reachable. My URL/site is in my "signature", so I can be reached. Via that, I can be emailed or you can IM me via Yahoo usually as I don't use AIM that much anymore.

Jingles has revealed my real email address on this forum in a "munged" format. I have also done the same thing IN THIS FORUM, so Jingles hasn't violated my privacy either, and he knows he can give it out here if necessary.

What about MySpace? I refuse to join that. If I need to contact someone via their MySpace, I have to log in. I don't want to log in!!

In the end, it is largely due to spammers, who right now are infesting Craigslist and annoying everyone they can while hiding behind Gmail drops(since Gmail largely hides the originators). Spammers are ruining in the internet. My mail server averages 200 FAILS per minute due toe spammers every single day. Times 1440 minutes(that's 24 hours), that's a LOT of spam bounced.

A PM function would be nice, but since this website is directly represented by a company that sells a product, it helps protect its users in the end by not having a PM service. For example, John Doe can PM you and say he represents the company and try and sell you product, repair product, and who knows what else. At that point, it is too much information for the moderators to have to look through and censor to make sure it is okay. Note the disclaimer I put at the bottom of the FAQ. And this is just one misuse among many.

Likewise, as Chris has pointed out, we have other means of communication. Email and instant messenger services. Jingles has both my personal and professional email address and I have given out my personal a few times on the Elation forum for users to contact me for help with things/wanted to view some of my work. So we talk every know and then when he has an issue/s he needs help with and visa versa via email (that was a whole lot of 'v' words lol). Jingles has free reign to hand out my personal email as well. I keep my professional private for a number of reasons, for example, here is the disclaimer at the bottom of my professional: *****************CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE:*************
If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender by e-mail at the address shown. This e-mail transmission may contain confidential information. This information is intended only for the use of the individual(s) or entity to whom it is intended even if addressed incorrectly. Please delete it from your files if you are not the intended recipient. Thank you for your compliance. Copyright (c) 2009

That is again, to protect myself as well as my clients. I deal with a lot of private/sensitive/top secret material every now and then and can't afford spam on that account.

ha. Serra i even know your real name most people on these forums do not. haha. Arent i special?

good topic you guys good topic.

Sincerely,

SerraAva:

One thing you have to realize is that your "disclaimer" is effectively worthless.

Why?

Once that email hits my server, it's MY property. As such, I can do with it what I want to do with it, INCLUDING posting it publically. Spammers have tried hiding behind such tactics only to see that it fails them every single time. My server, hits my drive, therefore it is MY data. Don't like it? Don't send it. I PROUDLY repost those spams on my web site and to news.admin.net-abuse.sightings, except right now Bob, the NANAS bot is down and that's annoying me right now.

Of course, if you're sending legitimate email(and you're not a spammer), then you're most likely in a circle where the disclaimer is more a formality.

If it has to be confidential, email is NOT the place for it. You don't want to know here it goes and how many places it can be intercepted and decoded. I have never exposed addresses that have become spam traps and have never in any way become publicized in any way, shape or form. My personal email on my domain is becoming useless but I refuse to change it to suit spammers. And I am losing but they are too. Shows how stupid they are.

The ADJ forum provides plenty of mechanisms for users to contact each other.

Lol, not like its a secret, it is just no one asks what my real name is. And yes, I am a male, not a female as jingles originally thought I was . Maybe that should be your next contest, see who can guess my name .

Yes and no. The email itself is yours, but the information contained within is mine. Since I have effectively copyrighted it, you are not legally allowed to reproduce it without my or the original author's consent. You can read to your heart's content, but can't reproduce. My company has sued people with information leaks before because of emails and won damages. I won't get into farther details out of respect for all parties involved.

As for confidentiality with regards to emails, all emails entering and exiting our servers are encrypted as well as the information within. We also don't send confidential material over an unknown network, meaning it is only sent from the warehouse and office network. A lot of stuff, by no real other choice, must be sent over email for us or via phone, which also isn't a good place for confidential material. Hard copies simply take too long for how often, much, and close to deadlines information changes.

Well, regardless, if a spammer puts something on my server, I'll do as I damn well please on it since they are trespassing. They can copyright it, copywrong it, or 419 it into oblivion for all I care, but once it hits my property, it's "game on" and I haven't lost yet.

I don't think you can copyright spam, lol. Could be wrong though, but since spamming is illegal, I don't think something illegal can be legally copyrighted. So continue to torture those spammers .

That's what I do over at

http://www.studio42.org/

I'm right now hamnmering those idiots who are scraping Craigslist and annoying me every single time I post there. If I come across one of thise "Advertising students", I'll make sure they get the F they so richly deserve.

Just think: if all ISP's would enforce TOS/AUP, we'd have the spam problem resolved.

In the meantime, the forum here has been self policing and when necessary, admins get in and take care of that which we can not. Of course, when admin doesn't get to move fast enough, I usually get to take a few shots at the forum spammers.

I think all the talk about privacy and spammers is a little much. At most all I've seen are a few senseless posts from spammers.

Sorry but this board is a cross between being ghetto, and stuck in the 90's. I guess I'm used to the good life. Again, my 2 cents.

Unfortunately, it becomes cost prohibitive to provide a full set of functionality and have it anti-spam.

Spammers are a bunch of bottom feeders. They find anything and everything to abuse. If you let them PM and IM you and email you via this, you'll quickly find all those services becoming useless.

ICQ, one of the first really popular non-IRC GUI chat clients, has become useless these days. AOL bought it and hasn't don't anything except let it fall to Russian porno spammers, who bomb IQC users will BILLIONS of spams an hour. AOL's position: ignore it, it's free.

You've seen how the Chinese spammers keep littering this place up.

I have forms on my site that I have to move from time to time and change the CGI name to stop the spammers. They download my form then use it to abuse me from the comfort of their whatever they occupy(a rat's ass?). So, I move the script. They tweek some of my fields to make them appear legit, but they can't fake the one field the CGI adds which nailes them every time.

So, again, if ISP's would enforce policy, we'd never have problems. Remember AGIS? One of the BIGGEST ISP's: GONE. Why? Spam. They loved spammer dollars, so the rest of the world said "Uh, no. You need to enforce your anti-spam policies" and AGIS said "go intercourse yourselves in the rectume with a big latex-based phallus". So, the rest of the planet basically said "No, intercourse YOU" and blackholed them into oblivion, forcing all thier clients to have ot move to "safer" grounds.

Spammers are costing ISP's around the world over $20 BILLION a year in losses and over-head costs. All this could be avoided by saying "We're taking a ZERO TOLERANCE policy on abuse".

It's one thing to go and send a nasty or offensive email, but when you get 200 complaints about the same message from 200 different people, well, that's abuse and it needs to be stopped immediately.

Once I decide to shut down my existing web server and throw up a temp server so I can redo the main one, I intend to add some security measures to my forms, and maybe add this web forum package or maybe something else. I know i'm gonna have to pay for it, that's for sure.

Alot of the online forums are free or are of little expense...with spam blocking support.

Unless it's a microsoft, aol, myspace, or some really big attention outfit; I dont see the spammers leaching onto a DJ lighting board to the degree that is being suggested.

It's not free. Someone is somewhere somehow eating those costs.

Why would spammers leech onto my web site? I'm a small company. Why purpose can they serve?

Spammers don't care about WHERE, they just care about being able TO abuse. They have "product" they wish to post, so they will.

I sold a stand for a flat panel TV via ebay. I started getting 20 spams a day from a Chinese cartel trying to get me to buy plasma TV stands. Dude, I was SELLING it, so clearly I didn't want it. That was the case, I ordered it, the company I ordered it from said it was back-ordered, and after 4 months my wife said "Hang the TV on the wall" and I cancelled the order for the stand. Suddently it was "on the way". WTF....

IF they can, they will. Guestbooks, comment spam, forum spam, web board spam, they don't care. Provide an avenue, they will spam it. And don't think your spam protected ones are immune, chances are a LOT more gets through than you are directly aware of since admins are most likely PAID to nuke it ASAP.

I had a group of idiots coordinate an attack against my web board years ago. All spammers who I was able to get shut down. Rather than learn a lesson about right and wrong, it's more about "I'll get him". Well, they are still out of business, their site that they coordinated the attack via was completed shut down, and where am I? I'm still online, not spamming and actively fighting spam still.

If little me can be targetted for no apparent reason other than to be disruptive, what would make some little DJ-0riented forum be excluded? These dirtbags have designed tools and software specifically to exploit THIS forum or at least this configuration. ALl they need to do is say "where" and their bots will do the rest.

I was forced to shut down my guestbook since spammers latched onto it. I had to shut dowm my web board for the same reason. I had to shut down my anti-guestbook page. I had to shut down my interactive links page. All because spammers feel their right to interfere is more critical than respecting the wishes of the site operator.

Now, I could have secured the web board by mandating some security measures requiring sign-in and confirmation/validation, but it got to the point where I have better things to do with my time. When I redo my web server, I'll test new PHP scripts for my forms that should allow me to use a CAPTCHA mechanism. If I cando that, then I should be able to tweak a REAL web forum(such as this) to include CAPTCHA as well unless they're already doing something like that. And this forum software costs over $150 to purchase if you want to be legitimate about it. So, there are costs. I've researched it.