It's getting worse, now the devs even decided to put a spammer friendly search function on the boards (at least @Seti). Now team advert spammers can easily search for teamless crunchers with some other criteria included, this is ridiculous.

It's been made public in some pseudo secret shady back room in Google by David Anderson, and it will be a perfect wet dream for Misfit and other spammers.

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

My suggestions for the pm system:

1) make pm something to opt-in, it has no immediate connection to the scientific project you join with creating an account, it's something different, a social network component. It should be opted in separately and voluntarily.

2) Ban known spammers from the boards and the pm-system

3) Restrict the pm per account to something like 5-10 per day (and that's recipients, 1 mail to 5 users counts as 5 mails)

4) make it clear in the forum rules that any advertisement via pm is considered spam and will be "rewarded" accordingly

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

...
3) Restrict the pm per account to something like 5-10 per day (and that's recipients, 1 mail to 5 users counts as 5 mails)
...

That would require a different treatment of PMs that you initiated and PMs that you sent as a reply. Reply mails should not reduce the quota.

PMs within a team should not reduce the quota either because some teams use it regularly for their project team specific messages. If someone spams within a team, the team founder should deal with that.

Does a post filter on the Misfits not double as a PM blocker? Would be my 'foreign' logic in how to configure.

No.
This is about spamming teamless crunchers, how should they know whom to set on ignore before they even knew that there is such a thing as pm?
This should mean set everybody on ignore by default and have to unignore everbody to read his/her posts in the fora, that's a bit overdone imho. It should be OK to just have an option for pm, that's set by default to "no".

I agree with Ananas that there may be some exemptions possible, for teams without a board who use the project fora as a communication tool, and for replies as well. But by default it should be: better a bit strict and not 100% convenient than spammer friendly.

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

David even wrote in the boinc_project list some encouragement for team advertisment spammers (bold by me):

I added a "user search" feature (html/user/user_search.php).
This is of critical importance for teams - e.g.,
it lets Team Ireland easily see what users from Ireland have
joined your project in the last few days.

This is intended to be linked from your front page.
(see, e.g. the SETI at home home page).

I recommend that all projects upgrade to this code,
and add a link from your home page.

-- David
-----------------------------
David 5 Nov 2007
- user web: add a general-purpose user search mechanism.
This lets you lookup up users sorted by
- descending join time
- descending total credit, or
- descending RAC
and lets you filter them by
- country
- presence/absence of team
- presence/absence of profile
It's implemented in such a way that no more than N
DB rows are examined
(i.e. it doesn't necessarily show you all the results)

All irish teams should pm the new irish users via pm, and to have this quite handy, they can search for this easily. Same for german teams of course, and I know of at least a dozend bigger ones from germany, more than 4000 in total. all should pm the poor users with team adverts if it's going Davids way, ridiculous!

So if this team advertising spam should be something good in his opinion, he's got a very disturbed mindset imho.

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki

At least the email notification is now switched to "off" by default, thanks for that, David.

So the unsuspecting scientific cruncher will not be bothered by the team advert spammers in his private email, just in his accounts pm inbox, which s/he will perhaps never visit.

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Gruesse vom Saenger

For questions about Boinc look in the BOINC-Wiki