Sending a p.m.

[Zumbilly(Murdoch)]

I have
had several attempts at sending a message to John A. Russell and I recieve a message telling Me that the recipient does not exist.I have sent and received messages to and from other members with no problem.
Billy

[WineRider]

Is he another of these bot. or spurious members??? It must be difficult to police and one strange thing of late is the number of Russians who have become members!!! I for one think it's possibly time to remove any "Member" who can not be contacted or who don't post to be removed. Perhaps it's more work for admin, sorry guys you do a great job but the net seems to have big holes in it and allows the nasties in.

[David Hartley]

I will let him know Billy

[Arcada]

You're perhaps trying to PM "John A. Russell" rather than his username "johnrussell".

If it's this member you're trying to PM, use the link on that page or this link.

Or use the PM button on any of his posts.

[Arcada]

Is he another of these bot. or spurious members??? It must be difficult to police and one strange thing of late is the number of Russians who have become members!!! I for one think it's possibly time to remove any "Member" who can not be contacted or who don't post to be removed. Perhaps it's more work for admin, sorry guys you do a great job but the net seems to have big holes in it and allows the nasties in.

That's perhaps easy to say, but when you understand the numbers involved you may appreciate the work that is done a little more

Actually, the anti-spam measures on this board work extremely well. To date, not one spammer has ever managed to successfully post a spam message.

The first line of defence is that all traffic to the forum is routed through Cloudflare, which automatically blocks known bad browsers, URL requests and IP addresses from even accessing the forum. In the last month over 3,000 attacks were blocked at this stage.

BSS Threats Blocked Last Month

BSS Threats by Country

If they make it through Cloudflare, the registration process itself is protected by reCAPTCHA (the "I am not a robot" checkbox you'll have seen elsewhere) which does a decent job at blocking, in the last 90 days alone, up to 155 registration attempts a day: -

BSS reCAPTCHA 90 Day Stats

A few manage to register (currently quite high at about 12 per day), and when they do their first post is queued for moderation. At this point the offending post (only seen by admins) is deleted, and the member removed and banned (by their IP number, username and email address): -

BSS Moderator Log (3 Days)

The dodgy members you may see now and then on the memberlist are spammers who have registered, and then not attempted to post, and so haven't come to the admins' attention. Every now and then the memberlist is pruned, removing all members with 0 posts (see Memberlist Pruning), but this isn't done too often as it runs the risk of deleting genuine "lurker" member who have registered but never got around to posting.

So there you go, an insight into the behind-the-scenes work against the spam army!

[Zumbilly(Murdoch)]

John Russell is a well respected steel player who is known to many members of this forum.Thanks Marc for the info,I am sure that I had been doing things properly but again,at My age ???? I did notice You said johnrussell, all one word which I did not try.
Thanks David I will have another go.
Best regards
Billy

[Arcada]

Thanks Marc for the info,I am sure that I had been doing things properly but again,at My age ???? I did notice You said johnrussell, all one word which I did not try.

It is very specific, the easiest way is to use the link from the profile or from the right hand side on any posts.

If manually typing the username for the PM recipient, it has to be an exact match, and case sensitive.

[Zumbilly(Murdoch)]

I have sent a message to John by following the link on His profile. I have tried various ways of typing John's title and still get the same result "The user name does not exist"
Billy
I have just sent a test message to another member and it went off ok.

[Uncle Roy]

Billy, try [email protected]
That will work.

Roy

[David Hartley]

His email is [email protected]