Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, especially advertising, indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media.
Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. In the year 2011, the estimated figure for spam messages is around seven trillion. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kill SPAM or SPAM will kill us. Our servers quietly deal with a lot of the attacks targeted at weaknesses in the server, email, websites and individual blogs. But the sheer volume of attacks seems to be on the rise, so batting the stuff away keeps the system pretty active and affects performance. Also, there are increasingly many opportunities that can be exploited.
The latest, that I had known about, but was slow to act on is image attachment spam. Did you know that you can add comments to pictures, once they are published? You already know that each time we leave comments open, the spammers will find us and start their pesky and pointless campaigns.
What are we are doing about it, ie image SPAM?
The majority of you seem to use the basic We Love Ourlocality template, so we’ve blocked image attachments through the template. That should lick 90% of the cases.
If you use some other template from our repertoire, you should activate the Comment Control plugin, which is in the Settings menu. This will allow you to override some of the core Discussion settings, but also retrospectively and globally switch the Comments flag OFF!
This should lighten your email load too, as many people check the emails on mobile devices, so we hope we are reducing the annoyance of waiting for tens of useless messages to download, only to delete them en masse.
