A Different Kind of Spamalot

Those familiar with Monty Python might appreciate this dialog in song from the musical...

• Customer: What have you got?
• Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon,
  egg sausage and bacon
  Egg and spam
  Egg, bacon and spam
  Egg, bacon, sausage and spam
  Spam, bacon, sausage and spam
  Spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam
  Spam, sausage, spam, spam, spam, bacon, spam tomato and spam
  Spam, spam, spam, egg and spam
  Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.
• Customer's Wife: Have you got anything without spam?
• Waitress: Well, the spam, eggs, sausage and spam That's not got much spam in it
• Customer's Wife: I don’t want any spam!

Lots of spam, that undesirable, loathsome spam. I think we all sympathize with the wife here. Certainly the DevCentral team does, as we’ve been dealing with a very persistent spammer over the last month. It’s nothing new, every site that promotes and encourages community (and many that don’t) has to deal with the lunatic fringe of the marketing world. To that end, we’d like to offer our sincerest apologies for the unsightly commentary in the Q&A section of our community, and the unfortunate side effect of your subscriptions resulting in the spam reaching your inboxes. No one wants to receive that mess, and we are grieved to have been a vessel for this distasteful marketing.

But enough words, let’s talk actions. It’s a lot like chess. Matching wits with spammers, countering the queen’s gambit with albin or QG declined. But rest assured that we are not sitting idly by. We have enhanced and added several countermeasures that have extremely dampened the spirits of the evil devil spawn, to the point where his efforts now are but a mere trickle. We’ll continue to monitor, learn, adapt, and grow. In addition to the work we’ve done on our end, there is something you can do as well to help. You can flag posts that are clearly spam (or offensive or inappropriate) as shown in the image below.

Given the new counter measures, there is a slight risk that a false positive will occur and something you post might be flagged as spam. If this happens, please notify us immediately at devcentral@f5.com and we’ll work diligently to resolve the issue.

Thanks for all you do to make this community great and for seeing us through this spam issue.