What’s with the kitchen posts?
Hi Tess, they are spam!
Best thing is to hit the ‘report thread’ button & the Tech Team remove them.
Bloody annoying though!
Pat x
How are they getting through the moderators in the first place?
Marion
Hi Marion, I guess they can just post like everyone else… and keep using different user names. The mod’s can’t be on every minute of every day.
Although how they can actually believe that anyone would buy their damn kitchens when they use such underhand ways to advertise is beyond me.
Pat x
It’s crazy, isn’t it!
They are everywhere - not just this forum, but others I frequent (unrelated to MS).
Obviously paid-per-spam. I agree you’d have to be mad to buy from anyone who uses such tacky and unprofessional tactics anyway. Does anyone see these ads and think: “Cor! I bet they’re a decent, reputable company! I’d like to have my kitchen from them”? I reckon you’d have more luck sticking a pin in Yellow Pages, than choosing someone who’s already revealed themselves to have such low standards.
Tina
x
I phoned one of the numbers a while back and said that some of the Forum users were putting the word out that they were spamming charities and hogging space needed for vital work(?)The girl I spoke to got quite flustered,but I can’t remember which crew of parasites I phoned.
Wb
If you look closely you will see that they post at very odd times - mainly early in the morning. We are very fortunate in that Val gets up around 6am and gets rid of an average of ten every morning.
First thing is to block the user name so that name can’t be used again then report and delete the post and feed it to our spam filter which should suddenly spot how many of these posts we get and block them…for some reason that has not happened yet.
Dealing with each one of these can take 4 or 5 minutes…Val now gets up earlier than usual to deal with them before going to work [she is a gem].
As you have noticed they still creep back in under new user names at any time of the day. It is very easy to run multiple email addresses and as they are from different ISPs we cannot block them completely this way.
Complaints from much higher up the pay scale than us Moderators [not difficult cos we don’t get paid] resulted in the number of spam posts increasing.
We are basically at our wits end. If any of you have any ideas or feel like writing to newspapers, MPs, uncle Tom Cobleigh and all please feel free to do so.
I’m not sure what Val would do with her extra hour every morning but I’m sure it would be much nicer than dealing with spammers.
BTW - If you spot any do report them in case we miss them.
Liz [Moderator]
We thought of that but we’d still get all the rest of the bumf…and imagine the horror of someone saying they had a bad fall in the (filtered word).
Liz [Moderator]
I replied earlier that I’d phoned a number and mentioned that the word was being spread that they are vermin.'Praps the management could contact other forums and their bosses and try to mount a concerted campaign against the spammers.
Anybody know anybody at The Daily Maelstrom/
Wb
[quote=“Spud”] [quote=efb]
We thought of that but we’d still get all the rest of the bumf…and imagine the horror of someone saying they had a bad fall in the (filtered word).
Liz [Moderator]
[/quote] Yes, I see what you mean. I had a fall in the filtered word only last week. Do you think they would filtered word off if we posted on their threads about completely unrelated topical and ruined thi posts?[/quote]
I haven’t found any way of doing that. You have to fill in a form to contact them - not just an email, and telephone contact is a joke.
Liz [Moderator]
Maybe we should all try to respond to the posts with things like “these kitchens are rubbish… do not buy one”… “these kitchens are filtered word useless… don’t waste your money”?
If we all try to do that next time they post they might filtered word off!!!
Shall we give it a try?
Pat x
I think they are of the “any publicity is good publicity” school of thought, so any response at all, even a negative one, will serve as confirmation the ad has been seen, and give them an incentive to do it again. It will also keep it near the top, ensuring even more people see it. Hard as it is to believe, I don’t doubt there are some lurkers here (not necessarily our regular contributors) who might be tempted by the ads.
After all, there are people who believe they’ve won millions in a lottery they never entered. The spamming costs the spammers next to nothing (they might be paying people pennies per post to do it), and they only need to find one person in a thousand dumb enough to be tempted, for it to more than pay off.
I wouldn’t let these guys anywhere near my kitchen. I do question whether you’d ever get a kitchen, or what sort of standard it would be if you did. It might be just a front for a total con. But some people can’t resist the word “cheap”. If they see that it’s cheap, AND apparently local (I notice the ads name UK place names, seemingly at random), they might think it’s too good not to call.
It might even be a premium rate number, and it’s the calls themselves that ARE the business, rather than kitchens. They might be making a quid or two from every enquiry, even if there is no genuine kitchen business.
Tina
x
Try anything you want…maybe trading standards or somesuch but please don’t reply on the forum.
Liz