Some of you may have noticed some posts and threads being removed from the forum.  Many of these threads have obviously been spam - the posts either have links to products, or the posts themselves make little sense in context.

However, some of the posts are simply "I agree!!" and it might appear that Chumby is censoring users that might seem to be agreeing with some complaint about the company or its products.

I want to assure you that this is not the case - I check these accounts against the widely used SPAM notification services and verify that the accounts are considered by the community to be spammers.  Typically, similar accounts (same email, same IP, and/or same content) will appear on dozens, if not hundreds, of forums within a very brief period.

Chumby's forum is actually fairly well protected against spam - we do email verification and use a captcha during registration, and we've recently (unfortunately) had to disable post signatures - however, the latest techniques used by spammers is to use veritable armies of cheap human labor in India, Pakistan, and the Philippines to create accounts and posts.

In many cases, the initial posts might seem innocuous or even on-topic.  Once the spammer sees that the forum will accommodate these posts, then the spammer will start turning the posts into ads and links intended to increase the profile of the target site in search engines. In many cases, you as forum users are not the target of the spam - but rather they're trying to get higher placement in Google searches, and chumby's forum is apparently well regarded by Google's search automation.

Thanks to those of you that have taken the time to report posts that are spam - we greatly appreciate your assistance with this issue.  At some point, we hope to automate this process and stop these spammers at the gate.