Yo Taormina

[confused2]

Give us a thing you like and a thing you don't like - or don't bother with that and just say Hi.
C2.

[C C]

Not sure what the motive is for the faux ones that neither surreptitiously spam nor slip website links into the personal profile sections. Maybe some bots simply fail to accomplish the latter after registering here.

There are (or were) software services that send Captcha images to humans in places like India and Pakistan, to solve them for the lamer bots. I suppose similar could be hired as scouts or forerunners who open up accounts for a whatever/whoever that will sign in and spam later. But many of these silent-type handles don't seem to have any life in them even in a delayed sense like that.

Or could the goal purely consist of harvesting other members' information after getting in? As if the scam capitals of Asia still view this as a virgin-web of the 1990s, with main email addies and other contacts scribbled everywhere on a forum's interior walls, along with detailed biographies?

Forum spam is probably an outdated entry in terms of the latest junk commercialism tactics.

###

[stryder]

Taormina is the author of a book that ask me (or marketing posed as that) to initially post a thread on the subject of his book. Now the problem is that this generated a few issues:

Firstly new members can't create threads, that's to stop the one time posters popping up to sell something (including books) and running off into obscurity.

While he did indeed ask for me to start a thread, without first assessing what it was they were trying to write about meant it was difficult to assess whether they had the true intention of discussion or just attempting to use the site as an outlet to peddle their wares.

I did want to send a reply PM to express these points conservatively and attempt to get them to post to other peoples threads so they could get to posting their own, but they'd actually set to disable PM's which means they wouldn't receive the message. While it is possible to override this as Admin (with some system manipulation) I rationalised that if they were intent on opening a dialogue here, they wouldn't have blocked the capacity to communicate with the members of the forum. This concluded to me that was just about a plug for their book more than actually being apart of the community here. (I could easily be wrong and I do welcome it to be proven otherwise)

I did find a cached version of the (self) published works online, It appears to be Taormina's interpretation of certain pop-culture physics and came across as lacking discussion beforehand. (In other words if segment by segment had been posted to a forum beforehand, it would likely have had people poking holes in his writing or identifying things that he was unaware of in physics likely due to his profession being somewhat different.)

This thread in itself would be enough for him to open up a discourse on the subject and explain what it's all about, but only time will tell if he actually wanted discussion here or was just "Spamming" forums.

Incidentally I've had a few instances in the past where bots have been used to attempt to get an admin to post a thread on given subjects, so my reservation are based on experiences but it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone that sends such a message is a bot, but that requires a bit more involvement with the forum to discover and make a decision about.

[C C]

Sounds like Taormina lacks either the exploring time or the ingenuity of Jon Bain -- or whoever it last was -- that roundaboutly hawked something along that line under existing topics (probably a "paper" rather than a book, though). I forget how many there have been or their names, although some of them did engage in discussion about their _X_ over the course of irregular days/weeks rather than just dropping a comment/link and moving on immediately. That sounds acceptable (certainly seen lots of passerbys and temporaries like that on other forums), albeit not leading to an increase of homesteading or settled members.

[confused2]

I take my hat off (again) to Stryder.