Hello

Just wanted to say I really enjoy this site, always using the site for new recipes or for ideas and have recommended it to anyone who has an interest in improving their methods in cooking Indian cuisine.

Is it my imagination or is there a heck of a lot of 'junk and scam' mail now coming onto the site?

This is a real shame and I am wondering if there is any way a filter can be put on to stop them

Regards

JL

We already have many filters but unfortunately, there are always surges of activity. Also, we often change some of the coding behind scenes which dampens it for a while until the spammers figure a workaround and it surges again.

We are introducing a new board system soon which will allow the moderators to hide spam more easily - at the moment only one person can delete spam directly from the forum database.

Please remember as well that this is a voluntary project - we don't get any income from it and my husband and I work on the site only in our freetime so we can't respond as quickly to this kind of thing as commercial sites with full time paid staff looking after things!

But I hope you will be able to enjoy the site anyway and ignore the spam until we are able to delete it. We try and check at least once a day.

Hi Kavey,

I hope I did not offend you and your husband in regards to screening. My thoughts were along the line that it is such a shame that such a good site is being polluted by rubbish.

I ( and I am sure others) really appreciate the time and effort that goes into your maintenance as well as the wonderful recipes/questions on food.

Keep up the good work

JL

As with all sites it needs constant work and management which Kavey and Pete are doing their best to keep on top of. Yes a few spam type posts get through and I hope no one is ever tempted to follow the links that they post. As mentioned it should improve when the new forum is made live as it will give the site a little more flexibility with its security and moderation. The amount of work going on behind the scenes is incredible and most people don't even realise....

thanks for all the hard work from the team and thanks for putting up with the odd spam post that gets through from everyone else.

Steve (AskCy)

Oh gosh, not offended AT ALL! Absolutely not!

We genuinely welcome all the feedback, good or bad, and many of the additions we've made over the years have been as a result of that feedback.

I just wanted to let you know the situation though as we do sometimes get email from folks who I think simply don't realise it's a hobby site and that we aren't able to work on it full time (or even much time at all).

Steve has kindly agreed to join us as a moderator once we get the new board online (the delay is purely my fault - Pete has the code all ready to put into place but I need to complete the user agreement). Plus mum's on holiday for a few weeks and we are away for a week ourselves soon so I think we'll probably wait for both trips to be over before implementing the new board.

But once we have that implemented any of our mods (me, Steve, mum) will be able to immediately hide spam posts so they are not visible at all and Pete can then delete them as and when he has time.

Pete changes something or other (he does tell me what but I'm not technie enough to follow) quite often and that usually stymies the spammers for a few weeks but there's been a huge surge in recent weeks. I've noticed it on other sites too though most have an army of mods to zap them away!

So glad you enjoy the site and thank you again for your messages.

Promise you, no offense taken at all!

maybe there has been some sort of spamming program released recently thats made the rounds of the underworld?

Steve

I'd guess that we've just made it onto a fresh list of "sites you can post on" that spammers work off - the spam blocking here at the moment is pretty effective but a little rudimentary, so every time they find a way through I have to go and scratch my head for a little while to figure out how to foil them.

As I've said before, I partly take it as a complement that our little site is popular enough for them to consider it worthwhile trying!

Goodness: I had no idea that so much work was going on behind the scenes.

Many thanks for all that work!

Phil

Phil

Well, it's usually a case of one or both of us squeezing an hour or two in here or there - we definitely don't put in enough time to implement all the improvements we have in our heads and would like to implement.

Mum has a big backload of photos that are waiting for me to process and upload, just for a start.

But glad you enjoy the site so much!

As for being popular - I often just do simple google searches on things like "stifado" or "stamna", "chapaties", etc.. to see how far up the pages a hit for this site appears, more often than not its on the first page or with in the first few...

Steve