On Sun, 29 Mar 2015 02:45:34 +0900, Yang Yu wrote:

Is the forum forums.opensuse.org managed by openSUSE project? A good amount of IP ranges are banned from viewing the forum (contact your ISP for spam abuses). ISPs can't care less if someone is spamming your forum for obvious reasons.

Because ultimately the only way to deal with the spammers coming in is to start blocking the addresses. We only block ranges after a significant number of spam posts come in from a particular range.

We tried an experiment at the start of the year and unblocked all of the blocked ranges. Almost immediately, we received a LOT of spam from those blocked ranges, confirming that blocking the ranges was the right move.

I registered an account to ask why my IP range was banned and found out later my account got banned for spam. Way to exercise dictatorship on the Internet.

We have to manage the community somehow; how would you suggest spammers be dealt with, if not preventing them from posting in the forums?

It's not "censorship" - it's community management, and it's something we *have* to do, or we end up with tons of spam in the forums, watering down the actual content.

Sorry this inconveniences you personally - talk to your ISP about doing something about the amount of spam that originates from them - like answering e-mails to their abuse address. Since you're a customer of theirs, they're more likely to listen to you than to listen to us.

Jim