Earlier today I asked the group to help me understand how the message
board on my elementary school website was being spammed. My district
was receiving profanity reports daily about my site! Half of the
respondents asked for a HIT, the other responses are copy and pasted
below. I understand a little more about it works, but I am really
irritated that I have had to remove a form of communication with my
students just before summer vacation. Spammers! Ugh!
Did you have it set-up so a password was required? (I did not, mc)
You can still also approve postings before they go up.
Spammers use a variety of crawler programs to harvest information about
webpages. All the submission info on a webpage, such as for your
message board, is embedded in the HTML code and can be harvested using
one of these programs. Spammers can then insert this code into their
messages and post it to the board. There are also "hijack" programs that
can run on a user's computer (unknown to them) that collect info on
sites they have visited and then send this info (passwords, etc) back to
people who spam so that they can target sites. This is sort of a
low-tech explanation but I hope it helps a bit. Cammie Backus I know
that a lot of this spam is done by computer or a bot (?). I think one
way to avoid it is to have (I'm not sure what it is called but) a box
where you must type in "the letters and numbers you see displayed". This
prevents a random computer from being able to automatically post to
your board. Even this isn't full proof though and I'm not sure how you
would set it up but youmight look into using something like that. Thank
you for all of your help! Molly
Molly Clark
Intermediate Librarian
Michael Maroun Elementary School
Phoenix, NY
mclark2@phoenix.k12.ny.us
"What a school thinks about its library, is a measure of what it thinks
about education." Harold Howe, former U.S. Commissioner of Education
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