spam on forums

Hi all,

As many of you have no doubt noticed, the NetBeans forums have been hit 
quite hard by spam bots in the last few days.  It seems they recently worked
around the anti-spam measures we had in place, so dozens of bots registered
and posted hundreds of junk messages all over the place.

So, I've just updated and improved the controls on the forum site to stop or
at least slow down any spam bots from registering.  Of course this is an ongoing
battle - in time the bots will no doubt work around these new measures, so
I've also installed a reporting mechanism.  Every logged in user will see a
"report" icon at the top right of every post.  It is hard for anyone to
continually monitor all posts and catch new spam, but if everyone can report
it we'll be able to respond quickly in future.

Thanks to those of you who reported lists of spam posts and users, it is very
helpful.  I've already deleted hundreds of posts and dozens of spam accounts,
and I'll continue that now.  If you do see a spam, please use the report
button to help us get rid of it quick.

Thanks for your patience.

-- 
Jack Catchpoole
NetBeans/Sun Microsystems
http://www.netbeans.org/