Im happy I finally signed up

[dusty]

How often, do you suppose, is the "newest member" (name displayed at bottom of home page) doing the same as ShellyHi?

[HopefulSSer]

I've no idea of numbers but it happens often enough to be notable, especially when their first post is especially generic.

[JPG]

+1

[jsburger]

I can think of at least 3 others in the last few months. No I don't have a photographic memory so don't ask for user names.

[edma194]

My wife scans Shopsmith forums on FaceBook for me. To sign up for them they ask a question like "What type of Shopsmith do you have?". I don't remember an exact question she answered, I don't think such a thing should exclude those who are curious, but some kind of question like "Why are you interested in Shopsmith tools?" might be useful. Instead of posts like "Hmmm..." or "Watching!" the first response should be "Welcome to the Shopsmith Forums. Please tell us about your interest in Shopsmiths". Then we can watch and see if they respond. If not an admin should close the topic they created. If they're really interested they'll return somehow. Also, we could link to a 'Newcomers' thread in the Community Forum to introduce themselves further. I realize most of these posts come from spammers or the like but we don't want to scare away potential legitimate forum users.

[dusty]

I can think of at least 3 others in the last few months. No I don't have a photographic memory so don't ask for user names.

Watch the "Newest M for a few days and I suggest that you will see it change frequently. Scan the post for yser name and you are likely to recognize none of the names.

[HopefulSSer]

I'll mention another common pattern is a "new user" will reply to a very old thread with a post that is generic and only tenuously related to the topic. And again, once the post has been forgotten it will be edited to insert the spam link

[edma194]

I'll mention another common pattern is a "new user" will reply to a very old thread with a post that is generic and only tenuously related to the topic. And again, once the post has been forgotten it will be edited to insert the spam link

With posts like that you can use forum search on a portion of the post and in previous cases it has turned out to be a copy of text from an existing post. Some of these attempts are just to get a spam link inserted, but they do resemble 'fishing' posts used elsewhere to lure in pigeons. Not likely to work with the usual forum users but still undesirable activity.