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Do you spend considerable time trying to stop spammers joining your forum? Or do you simply just let them join and then ban them on their first spam message?

It’s hard to know which way to go.  Either way, there is time spent on filtering these online pests.

I recently came across a site called Stop Forum Spam and you can enter the ip address of a new member to see if that same person has been registering with multiple forums over a short period of time. I’ve found it’s taken the guesswork out for me and I can ban them straight off. I usually include an email message with the rejection message with any I’m not sure about banning, i.e. if there’s not sufficient evidence that they might be a spammer, just so I’m not rejecting anyone genuine, but for the most part, it helps me determine the spammers from genuine members.

Tags: Forums // 1 Comment »

I host/manage a memorial blog for a well known speaker here in Australia who recently passed away. As a result I’ve been moderating the comments on the blog.

A week or so ago I noticed a comment from someone I know personally but was posted by someone else. I let it publish because I assumed she had a support person doing it for her – and perhaps they didn’t know how to post it from her address.

But then I saw that overnight someone else had done exactly the same thing using the very same person’s name so I went through all the past comments and found that these two people (I will now refer to as spammers) had copied and pasted parts or whole comments and then posted with their own links.  I went back and marked both comments as spam and deleted them.

If I didn’t know this particular person personally chances are I probably wouldn’t have picked up on this new spam trick and would have let the comments be published.  You need to be ever vigilant with comment posts to blogs you own, or blogs you are managing for other people.

Tags: About Blogging // 2 Comments »

Yeah, me too. And what about thanking a client for something special? You meant to but it slipped your mind and now some time has passed, it seems almost irrelevant or an after thought.

How would you like to fix that problem? You don’t even have to go to the shops to buy a card or a postage stamp or anything, you can do it completely online. You would? Hoping you would say that.

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• Create your account (there are three types available – Retail, Wholesale and Entrepreneur packages)
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• Create and send personalised cards using your own images or the many thousand already available with Send Out Cards
• Create and maintain Campaigns for you.

You know personally what it means to you when someone takes the time to send a card to you expressing their thoughts and feelings. Now you can do the same without having to go to the shops to find the right card, write in it and then take it to the post box. It can be done completely from your computer – or mine if you want me to handle it on your behalf. Imagine… you never will forget a birthday again!

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Tags: Business Operations, Networking // Comments Off

Put it this way. If the phone was ringing would you let it just ring out, thinking you’ll answer it tomorrow?

Email is another form of communication but unlike the phone can’t make the urgent sound that demands you answer it immediately.  So it amazes me how many business people (including banks and large corporations) don’t actually reply to emails, even ones that are relatively urgent) till days or weeks later.  Why is that?

I believe it’s because they don’t have staff regularly monitoring their email and that’s a poor thing.  It’s a legitimate form of communication and people will use it because it’s convenient.  Why is it convenient? Well, let me count the ways:

1. They don’t have to wait for someone to answer the phone
2. They don’t have to call during business hours but rather send a message at a time that suits the sender
3. Written email will often help clarify the problem or request and additional information can be sent such as images, copies of text, etc
4. They don’t have to sit on hold for a long time as is often the case when making phone calls
5. Written responses mean that the receiver can read over it again and again to check on the response rather than having to depend on their memory whether they heard right.

I’m sure there are others but this was just off the top of my head.

So, will you be checking your email regularly now rather than just thinking about it occasionally?  It’s worth thinking about.

Tags: Email Etiquette // 3 Comments »