Why all these spam posts about movies?

[ScottyP]

What is with all the SPAM postings about movies? They appear overnight every morning. Obviously I don't open them. do we know if they are viruses, or pfishing traps or are they just spam ads?

Their titles always start with "Watch". Could the mods filter out all posts that start with "watch"? I don't open them up but it is still pretty annoying when in the morning 1/2 the new posts are one of these scams.

[cicopo]

Once again this site is SPAM central. Is this site listed on others as the best place to SPAM the planet?

[ScottyP]

The spam is all coming from new accounts. The spammers create a new account every time they post a new spam so they cant simply be blocked.

All this site needs to do is what a lot of other sites do; do not let anyone's very first post go straight to the board. Instead, every new contributor's very first post goes to the moderator's mailbox or a non-visible limbo place somewhere. The mods must read the post and then either reject the post (and the post-er), or else deem it legit and free that poster's account to post directly to the boards from then on.

Deleting them before they hit the board Seems no harder than the current system, which appears to be deleting them after they hit the board. Maybe those spamming doorknobs might even quit trying to post.

[TCampbell]

On the sites that I've moderated in the past, when we "block" someone it not only blocks their account (with option to auto-remove messages posted by that account) it also blocks their IP address.

But as this is Canon USA for North America customers, there's really no reason why Canon shouldn't just block the entire subnet.  

When I was a moderator elsewhere, literally every one of these types of spam messages came from somewhere in Asia.  It might take some work, but they could probably develop a filter to allow 1st time posts to go through if from North America, but require moderator approval for messages originating from outside North America.

[ScottyP]

Latest: today a new member called HCT8X created an account and posted 4 posts. He did one in each of the Camera topics. That titles were all 5-6 word sentence fragments. Together, from top to bottom, they all formed a little message so everyone sees the message whether you open them or not.

Now they are just playing with this site.