I received this spam PM
Should I forward it to the Straight Dope Spam Officer of the Watch so that, hopefully, the address can be blocked? Or should I simply nuke it?
It’s only fair that the SDMB get a 30-per-cent cut.
I just PMed Marley this thread.
Yeah, it would also help if you told his their name so we could ban them as soon as possible.
Since we’re probably not going to get that cut, I’ve banned the spammer.
Thank heavens I got in under the wire before he was banned and sent him my credit card information and bank routing number.
I’ve heard from two other Dopers who also got PMs. There was a total of 5.
Sorry about that.
Make that six. I deleated it from my notification box.
I didn’t get one, and I’m interested in the offer. 
PLEASE,
If you get a private message that seems like spam, PLEASE send the name of the poster and a text of the message to a mod/Admin. We need to get them to their final resting place as soon as possible. Thanks.
samclem
Do they just join, not post but PM some likely candidates? Seems pretty resource intensive- especially on a message board where the discussion are normally a bit above bogan status.
Anyway, they must have thought I was a skinflint as I didn’t get a PM.
At least some of these spammers join and never make a post, they just send PMs. And yeah, it does seem to be inefficient. But who ever claimed that spammers think logically?
This is why many boards do not allow certain priveliges until a certain number of posts have occurred.
I don’t think spammers – and certainly not spambots – pay attention to stuff like that.
They just get in where they can.
We have people who don’t even get to the board to make a comment because they think the registration process is too onerous as it stands now – they have energy to complain but not enough to finish the registration! And that is how things are now. If we denied them them rights and only gave them partial access or none at all for a while I doubt you’d see any new blood at all.
I’ve rarely joined a board that didn’t restrict access to some aspects of the board for new members. Some have actually kept new posters entirely moderated for their first five posts to weed out spammers.
If someone is such a special snowflake that they wouldn’t join a message board simply because of a very sensible very common technique to reduce spam that’s not somebody who’s going to make a particularly valuable poster.
Well, that’s just ridiculous. Most boards have restrictions on new members for *precisely *this reason.
Me too. You didn’t happen to get your gold yet did you? Mine is in the mail.
I was going to say that given some of our recent members a any new blood is not necessarily a bonus but Kayaker beats me hands down 
Yeah, almost every board has that kind of restriction and IIRC, vB specifically recommends a limit like this to cut down on spam PMs
But, don’t forget, this is from a board that thought they’d get lots and lots of new members by requiring them to pay to provide them content that would be used to sell the board. So…you’re a newbie, you want to join, you get 30 days of posting and then have to fork over $15/year. To provide them content–what else do you get? Custom titles? No. Avatars? Hell no. Just…the right to post to a group that was getting smaller every year. :rolleyes: Everyone else outside of the people who run the board thought it was crazy as well. They lost, as a guess, 2/3ds of their casual posters (just based on reading–I’ve got nothing to back that up except my impression) and even after they reversed course, the board has never been the same–used to be that GQ and the Pit (which I read) would have such turnover with new threads that they’d get 50+ new threads a day or so–new threads would actually scroll off the page (at 50 per page) in a day or two. Now? Weeks. A large chunk of the people they drove away never came back.
For years they claimed it was “impossible” to allow loyal users who stuck with them through those Pay To Post years who’d accidentally missed the deadline renew to keep their custom user group. It was “impossible” to move them back into it manually. Until they realized they were losing revenue and…it wasn’t “impossible” any more.
For years they claimed that there was “no way” to block specific ads. If the ad server served you up racist crap, obvious scams, illegal stuff, etc, it was unfortunate, but it was simply the way it was: all or nothing. Until they started losing users due to malware and then…oops, I guess it was possible.
Long story short, they probably believe that telling a new user that they have to make 10 posts will drive away people. But they also believed they’d increase their user base and increase new posts by charging users for it.
So…you cannot underestimate how out of touch with the rest of the entirety of the web (not to mention their own software) they are. I still think that someone–whoever the final arbiter of these things is, is someone’s grandma wondering “But why does the kitty even want the cheeseburger” and trying to find a way do their own version of Badger/Badger/Mushroom.
I noticed my PM Ghana gold offer yesterday and just deleted it, I guess I should have reported it.