Spam Diary Eradication

Hi all,
     Firstly, I apologise if you've written to me requesting a new diary since I closed off the new user creation facility – I haven't created any new diaries as I've been overrun with school work and 3 babies under 2 years old 🙂 Feeble excuse but I'm sticking to it.

The positive news is that the number of requests I'd received prompted me to consider getting the mechanism in place where you guys can help me out! I have today cobbled together a system built from other pieces of the system which were already in place, so I managed to get it done fairly quickly during the twins nap time. However, being a cobble together as it is, has some disadvantages. Notably that it's not a simple click and shoot idea. It will take a couple of clicks to be rid of a spam diary and possibly an extra login screen. At least for the first one you do.

Anyway, here's how it works;

If you've raised your hand to be a volunteer and I know who you are 'from days of old' so to speak, then when you login to your diary next time you'll see a yellow bar across the top of the screen just under the logo bar. Within that bar is a link which will say Mark Diaristname as SPAM – Diaristname is replaced with the actual username of the diary. Clicking that link will take you to a special script where you will be asked to login. Use your normal DearDiary username and password to login (you will only need to do this once per session, so if there's multiple spammers you want to blitz then the subsequent ones won't require you to login). There you'll be presented with a screen that you can place a tick into the box to mark the user as a spammer. Once you tick the box, click the Save Details button.

[EDIT] Make sure you're viewing the spam diary when you hit the link. If you're in your own then you'll be marking your own diary as spam – probably not what you want!

The system uses a number of mechanisms to attempt to identify other diaries belonging to the same user, details of which I won't go into, but it may be that multiple diaries get blitzed as a result. The screen will tell you if it found other diaries.

It sounds harder than it is. In reality, click the link in the yellow bar, and then follow your nose 🙂

If you login to your diary and then visit a spam diary but the yellow bar doesn't show up, try to view another entry of the spammers. The caching system sometimes means that the yellow bar doesn't get shown. If that happens too often and you can't get around it, let me know and I'll work something out.

If you don't get the yellow bar and you volunteered to help, let me know and I'll update the list of 'Assistants' that the system recognises, or I'll write back to you and say thanks but no thanks at this stage 🙂

Enjoy!

Steve.

 

P.S. For whomever it was that asked how they get on our 'friends list' – login to your diary, then choose the Manage Friends List link in the Members Button Bar. There you can add – deardiary1 and you can receive our notify emails.

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